Riikka Söderlund is the chief operating officer at Katana Cloud Inventory, a Finland-based platform that helps small product businesses run inventory, manufacturing, and multi-channel sales. She and host Michael Koenig discuss how AI search is affecting product discovery, why an out-of-stock product is invisible to an AI chat, and why she thinks marketing is an underused path to the COO seat. Along the way: six-week sprints instead of quarters, why Katana opened its API while SAP closed theirs, and the brand that discovered it had been selling at a loss.
Why marketing is an underrated path to the COO seat, and what narrative building does for an operator that sales training does not
The six-week sprint, why four weeks is too short and eight is too long, and how she bridges the gap between a key result and an actual plan of execution
Product metadata as the new SEO, and why an out-of-stock product does not get surfaced by AI search at all
The Shopify earnings-call number: AI referral traffic to Shopify stores grew 13-fold quarter over quarter
Why Katana opened its API to any AI the customer chooses while SAP closed theirs, and why she frames that as a values choice about who owns inventory data
The brand that did not know its cost of goods sold was negative, and the one that found $40,000 of inventory it had misplaced
Riikka Söderlund is the chief operating officer at Katana Cloud Inventory, where she runs the commercial side of the business. She spent two decades in marketing, starting in Helsinki ad agencies, then a decade in consumer marketing, before joining Katana as VP of marketing and later CMO. She studied communications, and she credits narrative building as the skill that carried across from marketing into operations. Katana serves merchants in over 70 countries, with more than $3 billion in gross merchandise value flowing through the platform.
Chapters
0:00 Cold open
1:04 Introducing Riikka Söderlund and Katana
2:12 From Helsinki PR to Vogue and Oprah
3:55 Why old-era marketing skills became rare
6:05 What COOs should learn from marketers
7:24 Storytelling, listening, and internal communication
10:37 Founder gravitas versus learned operator skill
11:53 Training to be a COO before the title
14:15 Running Katana day to day
15:22 Goal setting and the six-week sprint
19:16 Physical goods, SAP, and the market gap
25:01 The golden era of creativity and branding
30:35 Product metadata is the new SEO
33:44 AI search and the internet economy
36:33 Opening the API while SAP closed theirs
38:06 Training for product management
42:02 The brand that didn't know it was losing money
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