The Product Experience

Blaine Billingsley is a Member of Technical Design Staff at OpenAI whose path into the field ran through music composition, spare-change website work at college, and a decade across Gmail, Airbnb, YouTube and Slack. At OpenAI he was hired to work on Presence, then redirected to solve a more immediate problem: making ChatGPT genuinely useful as a daily tool for designers. Working with a single engineer, he built the ChatGPT product design plugin — a bridge between the raw power of Codex and the day-to-day workflow of product teams. In this conversation with Randy Silver, he talks about what design actually means when your interface is a text box, why volume beats perfection in an age of infinite iteration, and why the fundamentals of good product thinking are more durable than the tools used to apply them.Key takeaways— The designer's job at an AI company has shifted from pixels to outputs. Deciding what "good" looks like, building the criteria to evaluate it, and heuristically assessing results is now a core part of the role — one that didn't exist in the same form at Gmail or Slack.— LLMs don't replace structured creativity techniques; they scale them. The crazy eights exercise squeezes eight ideas from a room of people in eight minutes. A well-directed ChatGPT session can return 80 in the same window, alone, while you're at lunch.— Volume beats perfection. The best way to make a pot isn't to try to make the best pot — it's to make a thousand pots. That logic now applies directly to prototyping: generate at scale, stay unattached, and find the nugget in the noise.— Evals are closer to synthetic user research than quality assurance. The hardest part isn't building the rubric — it's correctly anticipating what people will actually try to do. Show it to one more person and your assumptions will immediately break.— The second 80% problem hasn't gone away. Getting to a working prototype is dramatically faster; getting that prototype to production is still gruelling — and becomes harder still when platform direction shifts mid-sprint.— Small teams with AI assistance need to protect the rituals that keep them aligned. When two people can each produce a week's worth of work in an afternoon, parallel drift becomes the real collaboration risk.— Role boundaries are dissolving, but specialisations still matter. The question is less "what is your title" and more "what does the band need right now, and can you play that part?"— Experience brings judgment; freshness brings juice. The best work often comes from junior designers unconstrained by years of accumulated assumptions — and both things need to be in the room.Chapters (00:00) Introduction(01:14) Blaine's background: from music composition to product design (02:32) What design means at OpenAI (04:21) The ChatGPT product design plugin (06:12) Deciding what to build: the early exploration (10:05) Structured creativity and LLM-powered ideation (13:37) Volume over perfection: the thousand pots approach (16:13) Designing as a two-person team (20:29) What is the job now? (23:33) Evals as synthetic user research (27:08) Testing at scale when you can't know your users (30:15) How they actually did the research (33:01) The second 80%: from prototype to production (35:06) Staying aligned without roadmaps (38:19) Demo: the product design plugin (44:52) When a prototype isn't ready to ship (48:26) Design sprints, reimagined (49:27) Advice for joining an AI-first product team (52:17) The jazz analogy: experience, freshness and your role in the band Featured LinksChatGPT for Work: https://openai.com/chatgpt Codex: https://openai.com/codex Figma: https://figma.com FigJam: https://www.figma.com/figjam Linear: https://linear.appOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Dr Cat Hicks is a psychological scientist and the founder of Catharsis, a human-centred research consultancy that works with engineering organisations. After self-funding her first open-access study into developer motivation, she was recruited to lead the Developer Success Lab at Pluralsight — a three-year programme that generated large-scale empirical research across hundreds of companies and more than 11,000 developers. Her book, The Psychology of Software Teams, published in July 2026, brings that evidence to bear on the question her industry keeps asking: why do smart people in smart organisations so often struggle to work well together? We talk about the hidden costs of treating developers as interchangeable units, what large-scale cycle time data reveals about individual performance, and how product managers can build the conditions for teams to actually thrive.Key takeawaysThe "brains and jars" model — treating developers as interchangeable, isolated computing units — does not just feel demeaning; it actively undermines the collaborative, social work that makes software teams effective, and is linked to burnout, self-censorship, and a breakdown of trust.Cycle time data from 216 companies and over 11,000 developers shows that individual performance fluctuates dramatically week to week — it is not a stable personal trait — which means slow periods are usually an environmental problem, not a personal one.Over-production pressure (the constant pull towards short-term delivery) has measurable cascading effects: developers stop mentoring, stop surfacing problems to managers, and stop investing in long-term code quality. It can be measured and, with committed leadership, changed within weeks.AI is producing genuine identity threats, not just productivity disruption. Teams that lower the "threat temperature" — framing change as a shared technical challenge and affirming that new skills can always be learnt — unlock significantly more adaptive and curious behaviour.Metacognitive scaffolding — building structured strategies for thinking about your own thinking, not just raw output — is more trainable than cognitive capacity and is almost entirely absent from how agentic coding environments are currently designed.Superordinate goals (shared outcomes that transcend individual preferences) allow diverse teams, including those who prefer deep solo work, to collaborate productively without demanding that everyone care about the product in the same way.Chapters(00:00) Opening (01:06) Cat's background and the book (04:40) Defining a software team (07:02) Building the Developer Success Lab (10:26) The brains and jars model (13:14) What the model costs teams (17:54) Why communicating value is so hard (19:04) What change looks like in practice (23:01) Code review anxiety and cycle time research (27:55) AI's effect on developer identity (31:57) Agentic coding and cognitive fatigue (35:46) Threat, play, and psychological safety (38:19) Working across disciplines (43:04) What product managers can do (48:00) Wrap-upReferencedThe Psychology of Software Teams by Dr Cat HicksThe Programmer's Brain by Felienne HermansThe Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald WeinbergDeveloper Success Lab (Pluralsight)DORA projectCatharsis — Dr Cat Hicks's consultancyFight for the Human — Dr Cat Hicks's newsletterDr Cat HicksLearning Opportunities Claude skill — by Dr Cat HicksDeliberate practice and chess improvement study (44,000 Chess.com players)Our HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Faith Forster has spent 15 years in product leadership. She was VP of product at Dex, acquired for approximately $600 million, and went on to serve as CPO at Legal, a payments and compliance platform. She now runs discovery.com, an AI-native platform that helps product leaders and teams make faster, better product decisions by connecting to their tools and synthesising competitor, customer and growth intelligence. She is also the driving force behind the Makers Manifesto — a cross-disciplinary set of values and principles for building great products in the age of AI, developed with 45 contributors from across product, engineering, design, and business leadership.We discuss:The manifesto emerged from 96 conversations with product leaders whose grasp of AI ranged from fully automated pipelines to treating it as a faster way to write PRDs — a gap that revealed an industry in urgent need of a shared reference point.Four values anchor the manifesto: purpose over possibility, value created over effort spent, learning loops over launch plans, and human accountability over full automation."Maker" was chosen over "builder" to signal that designers, engineers, salespeople, customer support staff, and founders all share equal ownership of the creation process — regardless of job title.Feature parity is no longer a defensible moat: when any competitor can replicate a capability within days, durable advantage must come from data, relationships, distribution, and business model.Product market fit can no longer be treated as a static milestone — in a market where products, competitors, and customer expectations shift simultaneously, fit must become a continuous, living part of decision-making."Done" now means adopted, not shipped. AI removes every excuse for clunky, one-size-fits-all experiences, and teams that still equate production deployment with completion are measuring the wrong thing.Making context explicit — codifying strategy in a form that agents and humans can both act on daily — is the principle teams consistently identify as their most urgent, immediate priority.Chapters00:00 Introduction 01:12 Faith's background 02:28 Origins of the Makers Manifesto 06:18 Makers Manifesto vs the Agile Manifesto 07:23 Why "maker" not "builder" 11:42 Four values and 16 principles 15:01 Purpose over possibility 19:10 Learning loops over launch plans 22:36 Who gets to be a maker 28:55 Durable advantage in the AI era 33:22 Staying close to customers 36:04 What's next for the manifesto 43:59 Wrap-upReferencedMakers Manifesto — https://makersmanifesto.orgdiscovery.com — Faith's AI-native product decision platformOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Our HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Our HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Charity Ibhadon is a Global Product Director at WPP, where she leads the development of an AI marketing tool. With 15 years in product — including three formative years at ASOS during its high-growth heyday — she came to the discipline via a decade in investment banking and an executive MBA. She has operated at VP and CPO level, leading large international teams across consumer technology and media.We discuss:— Why the explosion of product frameworks, books, and LinkedIn benchmarks has made it harder, not easier, to feel like you're doing the job well — regardless of seniority— How the physical symptoms of burnout can masquerade as markers of success, and why high-achieving women in particular are vulnerable to that misreading— What it actually takes to recover: stepping away, finding what your body needs outside of work, and stopping short of making your job your entire identity— Why being genuinely enjoyable to work with is a more durable career advantage than any certification or methodology— How the Eisenhower matrix — do, defer, delegate, delete — can be a practical daily tool for protecting energy, not just a poster on a wall— The case for "happy high status": remaining calm and unflappable under pressure as a learnable leadership behaviour, not a personality trait— Why commercial curiosity — understanding what moves the business and staying interested in the world — will matter more for long-term product careers than AI certificatesChapters:0:00 Introduction 1:29 Charity's background 4:00 Why product feels harder than ever 6:34 Why fun at work matters 8:45 Recognising burnout 10:25 When burnout feels like success 12:13 Finding your way back 16:18 Fun as a strategic advantage 18:00 Staying calm under pressure 22:26 The "CEO of the product" myth 22:41 Mindset for a long career in product 24:45 Building resilience 26:35 Wrap-upReferencedEisenhower matrix | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priorit...Charity's keynote at #mtpcon London |    • Product is Hard. It should still be fun: C...  Our HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Vonny Laing is a user-centred design lead at the Student Loans Company, part of the UK government, where she oversees a service used by millions of people at every stage of their higher education journey. She has held roles spanning UX design, content design, and head of design across both public and private sectors, and completed an MBA specifically to earn the language of business — and with it, a seat at the table where design decisions get made. We discuss why designing from the majority inward produces invisible failures, how flipping to an underserved-first model creates a halo effect for all users, and why government service assessments make the happy-path approach structurally untenable. Vonny shares how a single day of guerrilla research at a further education college surfaced a critical gap between student loan payments and universal credit eligibility that years of data had never revealed — and why synthetic users can never replicate that. We also get into her "eat your greens" principle for designing across a user's whole life; the case for disaster thinking over happy-path optimism; how stories and verbatims move executives more reliably than dashboards; and why designers who learn to speak business become a secret weapon in any organisation.Chapters:(00:53) Welcome and introductions (01:23) Vonny background (02:10) Moving fast in the civil service (04:02) The UK government digital community (05:05) The pyramid model (07:03) Underserved versus edge case users (08:09) Designing at population scale (09:43) Service assessments and design accountability (11:01) Discovery research methodology (13:25) Finding users invisible in the data (16:22) Bridging gaps you cannot fix (18:42) Eat your greens: needs versus wants (20:07) Designing for users over time (21:04) Worst-case scenario thinking (22:11) Mining complaint logs and prioritising (25:47) Why synthetic users fall short (28:12) Where automated testing has a role (29:19) Leave the building: guerrilla research (33:03) Communicating research through storytelling (36:29) Why Vonnie did an MBA (39:03) Design's ceiling in organisations (42:04) Wrap-upOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Recorded live at #mtpcon London, Lily sits down with Emily Tate — former MD of Mind the Product for a broad debrief on the day's themes. They cover why product and design may matter more in an AI world than ever before, how heritage organisations can navigate transformation without the luxury of greenfield conditions, and what it actually takes to get internal stakeholders on side. Emily also makes a case for why SaaS isn't dead, why positioning fundamentals haven't changed despite the AI frenzy, and why remote work is draining the fun out of product teams.Chapters0:00 — Intro1:00 — The state of AI in product: still an inflection point3:18 — AI is a technology, not a moat4:57 — Keeping the humanity in product work6:13 — Advice for PMs new to the industry8:38 — Why conferences need both practical and inspirational talks10:24 — How to start speaking: find your local ProductTank13:46 — You don't need a novel idea to give a great talk16:01 — Charity Ibhadon's talk: product is hard, but it should be fun16:19 — Remote work and the slow erosion of joy at work19:15 — Innovating inside heritage organisations21:39 — Stop trying to educate stakeholders about product24:06 — April Dunford on positioning: what AI changes, and what it doesn't27:00 — The SaaS-pocalypse myth28:47 — Predictions: 12–18 more months of heavy AI talk30:59 — Filtering signal from noise: where Emily reads31:40 — Eric Ries' Incorruptible and building companies that resist corruptionKey takeawaysIf your only moat is AI, you don't have a moat. AI is a capability, not a product. The question is how you're using it to serve customers better than you could before — not whether you're using it at all.Building is no longer the bottleneck — deciding what to build is. That shift makes strong product and design thinking more important, not less.Stop trying to teach stakeholders about product. Drop the methodology, use their language, show them something tangible, and bring them along in ways that make sense to them — not to you.SaaS has a defensible edge. Products built on experience across hundreds of customers carry knowledge that a single company building its own solution can't replicate. That's a positioning story worth telling.Positioning fundamentals haven't changed. Sprinkling AI on your messaging doesn't sharpen it. Outside of tech, leading with AI can actively damage trust.You don't need a novel idea to give a great talk. Your version of a familiar concept might be the one that finally makes it click for someone. Start at a local ProductTank.Don't try to be someone else on stage. Find your style by doing it. Authenticity beats borrowed charisma.Remote work is eroding team joy in ways we're not measuring. The informal moments that build relationships and make work fun don't happen on Slack or in back-to-back video calls — and the resulting friction is real.Featured links  Incorruptible by Eric Ries — https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/460881/incorruptible-by-ries-eric/9780241692028The Decision Stack by Martin Eriksson — thedecisionstack.comChristian Idiodi — Silicon Valley Product GroupApril Dunford — aprildunford.comFind your local ProductTank — producttank.comMind the Product — mindtheproduct.comOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Lindsey Jayne is an independent product adviser and coach, and former chief product officer at the Financial Times. She began her career at the Government Digital Service, where she stumbled into product management by chasing someone down a corridor holding a MacBook that actually worked. What followed was 15 years moving through startups, scaleups, and ultimately one of Britain's most storied media institutions.Chapters00:00 — Introduction01:08 — Lindsey's origin story: from a broken government laptop to product management02:48 — Why product managers burn out: accountability without authority05:34 — Influencing stakeholders using discovery skills07:19 — What leaders can do to clear the way for their product teams08:44 — Stakeholder mapping: the influence and interest framework09:41 — Recognising burnout signals in your team at scale11:16 — Balancing passion and sustainability: when enthusiasm becomes a pattern14:16 — When to transition from individual contributor to product leader16:24 — Product reviews and cross-team knowledge sharing18:42 — How to communicate effectively with senior stakeholders20:40 — Career-defining advice: you don't have to die on every hill21:43 — Half your job is landing the product, not just building it22:25 — The most common mistake junior product managers make24:05 — How to tell your story after a difficult or toxic company exitOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Our HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Dave Martin has spent more than two decades in product leadership, with a string of C-suite roles, a couple of exits and a book, The Product Momentum Gap, to his name. He is also dyslexic and ADHD, and has built a career while masking the effort it takes to "think normal". In this episode he makes the case that the advice handed to neurotypical leaders often fails the roughly half of tech workers who are neurodivergent, and lays out a practical playbook for landing your message, leading the room and progressing without pretending to be someone else. Chapters00:00) Welcome, and Dave's background in product(02:03) "I've been masking it": faking thinking normal(02:37) The meeting where your idea is ignored, then credited to someone else(03:28) AI as a "spell check for influence"(04:07) The myth that growth requires pretending to be neurotypical(05:15) Why standard leadership advice fails neurodivergent leaders(06:45) Executive presence, signal presence and signal drift(07:57) Is this universal, or specific to neurodivergence?(09:48) From "dumb kid" to writing C++ at ten(11:27) When a word processor flipped his Fs to As(13:24) The trap: leading with detail(15:42) The boardroom moment that gets you labelled "not strategic"(17:05) Designing for re-tell: what the room repeats when you leave(18:19) Three mistakes that kill your influence(19:36) The CALM framework(21:32) Authority and the signal prep exercise(22:14) Three questions: outcome, one-line recommendation, re-tell(24:44) "Minutes not months": seeding the line that gets repeated(26:56) Learning: vulnerability and psychological safety(28:27) Momentum, well-being and burnout(31:21) Why burnout is a leadership fault(32:01) Mia's story: the head of product who wanted to be CPO(34:20) Recognising the trigger and practising signal prep(37:06) When stakeholders started calling her strategic(38:31) The opposite trap: abandoning detail entirely(39:22) Why some leaders step back into IC roles(41:16) Free training and AI as your spell checker for influence(42:26) Closing thoughtsKey takeaways— Authenticity is not the goal; deliberate communication is. Dave's central provocation is that "be your authentic self" assumes everyone in the room thinks the way you do. For a leader who sees patterns instantly and works in deep, hyperfocused bursts, behaving authentically can mean failing to explain the obvious and struggling to empathise with those who need the journey, not just the destination.— The symptoms are universal, the tax is not. Everybody's message gets lost in meetings. What separates neurodivergent leaders is the cognitive cost of noticing that drift and correcting it. As Randy and Dave agree, the tools discussed here help everyone, but the impact is far larger for those paying the higher tax.— Leading with detail is the career trap. The very trait that makes someone an exceptional individual contributor, the ability to go deep and surface every edge case, can sink them in the boardroom. — Answer a strategic question with edge cases and you are labelled "not executive" with alarming speed, and undoing that label takes months of work.— CALM is the alternative. Clarity, authority, learning and momentum, delivered calmly. Authority comes from being clear on the outcome and the ask, asking for support and guidance rather than permission, and not feeling obliged to justify every edge case.— Signal prep is the practical tool. Three questions: what do I need from this room; what is my one-line recommendation; and what will they repeat when I am not in the room. A bonus question for higher-stakes meetings asks what the room feels now and how you want them to feel when you leave.— Design for re-tell. Dave's example of a leader who reduced a lengthy objective to "minutes not months for our customers", and repeated it, is the clearest illustration. That phrase, not someone else's reframe, is what got repeated in the room afterwards.— Well-being underpins momentum. Dave nearly named the framework around well-being. Without a sustainable pace, leaders cannot lead, and the unprocessed meeting that keeps you awake at 3am is a momentum problem. He frames widespread tech burnout as a leadership failure, because leaders set the expectation.— AI is a spell checker for influence. Just as a word processor turned Dave's Fs into As without changing his brain, AI tooling can help neurodivergent leaders translate their thinking into the right language for the room, supporting the communication without doing the thinking or the judgement for them.Our HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Barry O’Reilly is an entrepreneur, author, and founder of Nobody Studios, an early-stage venture studio focused on building AI companies. Over the last six years he has worked with founders, executives and enterprise leadership teams to rethink how organisations operate in the age of generative AI, while simultaneously building and launching companies inside the studio model.A former startup advisor and executive coach, Barry has spent the last several years studying why most AI transformations fail despite enormous investment. Through his coaching and advisory work with leaders from companies including American Airlines, Skyscanner, and Slack, Barry has developed practical frameworks for improving decision-making, reducing administrative overhead, and increasing what he calls "decision velocity".In this episode, Barry explains why AI adoption fails when companies focus on tools instead of behaviour change, why judgment is becoming the most important human skill, and how teams can use AI to improve collaboration rather than replace people.Key takeaways — Most AI transformations fail because organisations start with tools instead of behaviours. Installing AI software does not change how people work, make decisions or collaborate. — The most effective AI use cases amplify a person’s natural way of working. Barry realised he produced better writing by talking through ideas and using transcription tools instead of forcing himself into traditional writing workflows. — Capturing meetings, conversations and decisions as structured data creates long-term organisational intelligence. Every interaction becomes a reusable asset that improves preparation, follow-through, and future decision-making. — Leaders must role-model AI adoption themselves. Organisations see better outcomes when executives openly experiment with tools, share lessons learned, and create psychological safety around adoption. — Decision velocity matters more than raw productivity. Teams improve when they arrive prepared, make decisions faster, reduce reversals, and spend more time solving meaningful problems instead of handling administration. — AI should be used to challenge thinking, not replace it. The most valuable prompts ask for blind spots, alternative scenarios, and pressure tests rather than definitive answers. — Teams working with AI outperform individuals working with AI. Barry cites research showing that collaborative ideation with AI produces significantly stronger outcomes than isolated use. — Productivity gains are meaningless if they simply create more exhaustion. The real opportunity is creating space for reflection, slow thinking, and better judgment. — Judgment is the critical human capability organisations cannot outsource. If people stop exercising judgment and rely entirely on AI-generated answers, they gradually erode their ability to make decisions under uncertainty.Chapters 1:03 — Building AI companies at Nobody Studios 3:16 — Why AI transformations fail 5:05 — The danger of focusing on tools 6:35 — Discovering natural workflows with AI 8:51 — Turning conversations into data assets 12:02 — Measuring successful AI adoption 13:14 — Why leaders must role-model behaviour change 18:39 — Decision velocity as a leadership metric 21:33 — Escaping administrative overload 23:02 — Why leaders need time to think 26:54 — What CFOs are worried about 28:08 — Can AI replace startup teams? 29:45 — Why distribution still matters most 33:13 — Capturing and synthesising ideas with AI 34:38 — Using AI to challenge your thinking 37:11 — Avoiding top-down AI-driven strategy 39:00 — Why teams plus AI outperform individuals 42:31 — The problem with AI-generated certainty 43:12 — Preserving human judgment 44:55 — Hiring for judgment and decision-making 47:19 — Final reflections on leadership and AIOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Dan Ciruli is VP and General Manager of Cloud Native at Nutanix. A computer science graduate of UC Berkeley, Dan spent a decade in engineering before pivoting to product management in 2003, a role that barely had a name when he started. Since then he has held product leadership positions at EMC and Google, where he was part of the team that helped create Kubernetes and open source Google's cloud infrastructure.He was a founding member of the OpenAPI Initiative and a steering committee member for the Istio service mesh project, and has spent the last two decades with one foot in commercial product development and one in the open source community.In this episode, Dan explains why open source is not a charity exercise, how companies actually make money from code they give away for free, and what product managers get wrong when they tell their engineers to avoid it.Key takeaways— Open source is not crowdsourcing from individuals — much of the contribution comes from companies investing on the clock, because broad adoption benefits everyone more than proprietary lock-in.— The CNCF succeeded because it created a neutral space where the largest and smallest organisations felt equally safe contributing and consuming. That structure — not the code itself — is what made cloud native computing universal.— Being a product manager in open source requires the same core instinct as any other PM role: understanding the why. The difference is that your engineers may work for a competitor, and your roadmap is not entirely yours to control.— AI is multiplying the capability of both good actors and bad actors in open source security. The answer is not to slow adoption but to keep a credible human in the loop — someone with accumulated trust, judgement and accountability.— Before open sourcing your own work, be clear on how your company will make money, articulate it concisely for leadership, and then find at least one other organisation — even a competitor — willing to join you. A consortium signals a standard. A solo release signals a gamble.Chapters1:16 — From engineering to product management3:11 — Bridging open source and commercial work5:05 — The origin of Kubernetes at Google6:35 — How Nutanix embraces open source7:16 — The crowdsourcing misconception8:51 — Why the CNCF changed everything11:25 — Building a defensible moat in open source12:13 — The business models behind free code14:18 — Managing roadmaps you don't fully control15:04 — When your competitor writes your code16:04 — The CEO who wore his secrets around his neck18:13 — Developing an open source strategy19:37 — The one question every PM must ask22:44 — What is the CNCF?23:34 — AI, open source and the security arms race29:45 — Chop wood, carry water: the human in the loop31:48 — Advice for PMs running open source products33:15 — Harnessing a community you don't manage34:38 — Should you open source your own work?36:35 — How messy does it really get?39:33 — Linux is an anti-patternOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

In the private sector, product teams pick their customers, generate demand, and ship into something close to a green field. In the public sector, none of that holds. Ayushi Roy — Chief Program Officer at New America's New Practice Lab and a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School — joins Randy to unpack what changes when your user base is already sitting in front of you, your scrutiny is congressional, and the right answer is sometimes to delete ten systems rather than build an eleventh.Drawing on her work on IRS Direct File, the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the Illinois childcare voucher system, and a text-based 911 alternative that rolled out to 800,000 students across 13 universities, Ayushi makes the case for a distinct public-sector product playbook: thin-slicing for safe failure, designing for the lowest digital denominator, separating design problems from engineering problems, and treating unbuilding as a first-class option.Chapter markers01:48 — From aid monitoring in Jordan to digital delivery03:37 — Why she built a text-based alternative to 91106:33 — From a rollout to 800,000 students to Oakland City Hall08:58 — What the New Practice Lab does, and what a CPO does inside a think tank11:06 — Why private-sector product playbooks don't transliterate14:03 — No marketing, no early adopters: latent demand and the curb cut effect14:40 — Oakland's eviction tool, MacBooks, and the lowest digital denominator17:30 — Thin-slicing IRS Direct File without losing Congress22:36 — Building executive sponsorship that allows safe failure23:41 — Product vs service: the rest of the job that isn't writing code26:09 — Illinois childcare vouchers: when modernising the form makes things worse29:22 — Design problems, engineering problems, and the laptop-hinge analogy33:18 — Can AI prototyping close the policy–implementation gap?35:40 — The FAFSA simplification crisis and the case for bilingual builders37:31 — Unbuilding: how a request for a 15th CHIP system became one to remove ten41:18 — What keeps her goingOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

In this podcast episode, Diane Wiredu, Founder and Messaging Strategist for Lion Works, underscores the significance of this key element. Diane breaks down a step by step guide on effective messaging, while also providing insights on engaging customers and growing products.Our HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Prathik Roy is Product Director for Data and AI Solutions at Springer Nature, one of the world's largest academic publishing companies. A quantum chemist and material scientist by training, he spent years in R&D before gravitating towards product management — and has spent the past 12 years helping publishers understand the value locked inside their content. In this episode, Prathik makes the case that publishers are sitting on some of the most strategically valuable data in the world, and that most of them are only beginning to understand what that means in the age of AI.In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction: from quantum chemistry to product management (05:00) The Schrödinger problem: why content value is increasingly unknowable (08:00) How traditional publishing metrics worked — and why they broke (11:30) The ChatGPT moment and its impact on scientific publishing (15:00) Paywalls, subscription models, and the shift to data licensing (21:30) How scientific content earns its quality — and why AI cannot just follow the citations (26:00) Why AI developers want bullet points — and what that means for content structure (29:00) New monetisation models: tokens, outcomes, and data as a service (33:00) Rights management: rights in, rights out, and why the prohibited section matters (36:30) Measuring content value when your users live inside AI systems (38:00) What to do with your content archive: extraction, licensing, and prediction marketsOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Martin Eriksson is a Product Leader, Co-founder of Mind the Product and ProductTank, and Author. His new book, The Decision Stack, offers a mental model for connecting every layer of organisational strategy — from vision to the decisions teams make every single day.We discuss:— Why 95% of employees cannot name their organisation's strategy — and what that costs— The five questions every company must be able to answer, from vision to principles— Why strategy is the most commonly missing layer in the stack, and why exec teams are often reluctant to fill it— How to challenge upwards and surface strategic gaps without calling leadership out— Why empowering teams without context sends them running in every direction— How principles — not values — are the tool that eliminates recurring debates— The "this or that" technique for making trade-offs visible across a team— Why you cannot communicate strategy often enoughChapters— 00:00 Introduction— 01:11 Martin's background in product— 02:19 The origin of The Decision Stack— 03:44 The five questions the stack answers— 04:27 Why strategy is most often missing or unclear— 08:18 Who should be making strategic decisions— 09:44 Time horizons: how long should strategy last— 11:43 Using the decision stack in practice— 13:36 How to surface gaps from lower in the organisation— 16:01 Why context is the prerequisite for empowerment— 19:32 How the stack reduces decision-making overhead— 21:04 Language, frameworks, and avoiding rigidity— 23:43 Where to start: top-down or bottom-up— 26:34 Fractal stacks and scaling across teams— 28:44 Strategy for maintenance work and existing products— 31:41 The role of principles at the foundation of the stack— 33:38 How principles emerge — top-down and bottom-up— 37:07 The "this or that" technique for surfacing trade-offs— 39:26 Communicating strategy continuously across the organisation— 43:34 The most common mistake when getting startedFeatured linksThe Decision Stack — Martin's new book: https://www.thedecisionstack.com/The trade-off poll tool mentioned in the episode: https://thisorthat.thedecisionstack.com/ProductTank: Martin Eriksson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martineriksson/HBR: The Office of Strategy Management — source of the 95% statistic cited in the episode: https://hbr.org/2005/10/the-office-of-strategy-managementOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

What does product management look like when your engineers aren't writing code? Rags Vadali, founder of Floto and former PM at Google and Meta, joins Lily and Randy to talk about how building AI-native products has completely inverted his process. No PRDs, prototypes before specs, and a new artefact at the centre of it all: the Product Experience Document (PXD).They get into why the real product when you're building an agent is the experience layer on top of it, how synthetic personas work (and where they don't), and what discovery still requires that AI can't replace. Plus: what product sense means when everyone on your team is shipping code.Chapters 0:00 What is a product when you're building an agent?1:00 Guest intro: Rags on getting into product at Google, YouTube, Meta, and now founding Floto3:33 How the team at Floto actually works — and why it's "completely upside down"6:01 Why building AI products forced a process inversion (and why speed made it necessary)7:11 Agents and the experience layer: redefining what the product actually is9:39 Running two to three products in parallel, and throwing away 50–60% of what gets built14:31 Discovery principles that haven't changed — and the ones AI is helping with18:15 Synthetic personas: where they work, where they don't, and the insight from flipping the question22:03 The Product Experience Document (PXD): genesis, philosophy, and why it's not a PRD25:57 Experience principles: encoding how it should feel to talk to an agent27:06 Good, bad, ugly: why example interactions and anti-patterns are critical28:55 Critical moments and closing conversations: designing the arc33:33 Where this way of working applies — and where it doesn't35:10 Hiring for product sense: why it now applies to every role39:43 Final advice: what product people should not stop doingFeatured LinksProduct Experience Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15kCm8ZcPqY12174WjyfuVLhrWOXGGqnB1vow7o_2ZqI/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.l62rzxz2fw6vFollow Rags on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ragsvadali/Our HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Kate Kempe made the leap from 13 years at Amazon — most recently leading Alexa's screened products — to head up product at the International Baccalaureate, an NGO with no established product function. In this episode, she talks through what that transition actually involved: finding focus during a job search through Phil Terry's Never Search Alone methodology, reconciling Amazon instincts with a slower-moving, mission-driven organisation, and learning to be interested rather than interesting when you're the new person trying to make an impression.Chapters01:07 — Kate's introduction01:37 — From arts degree to Amazon: career origins03:30 — Why leave Amazon? Finding the IB opportunity05:08 — Never Search Alone: how the job search council works10:37 — Building a personal inventory before committing to a role13:38 — Amazon vs the IB: culture, pace, and decision-making16:10 — Making the case in a mission-driven organisation19:02 — Influence and persuasion — the "bus" analogy23:44 — Building a product function from scratch25:10 — Shifting from project delivery to product health29:45 — Crossing domains: how to land and establish yourself35:26 — Be interested, not interesting37:50 — Advice for big tech → mission-driven transitionsOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Pippa Topp, Chief Product Officer at giffgaff, joins Lily and Randy to talk about emotional intelligence in product teams — what it is, how it develops, and why it matters for leadership. The conversation covers recognising defensiveness as an EQ signal, the conscious competence model, applying empathy inward as well as outward, and how to cultivate a culture of reflection across a product org. Pippa also shares her own journey from judgement to over-empathy to finding the balance, and makes the case for self-belief as the foundation of emotional resilience.This episode is brought to you by Mailtrap, modern email delivery for developer and product teams: fast delivery. high inboxing rates. 24/7 expert support. Try for free today.Chapters00:00 – Introduction & what is emotional intelligence?04:39 – How low EQ shows up at work: defensiveness and reactive communication08:28 – Extending product empathy skills to stakeholders and peers10:33 – The conscious competence model and coaching people who don't know what they don't know13:21 – Coaching techniques: life stories, separating facts from narrative14:58 – Assessment tools and organisational EQ at giffgaff (Insights)16:33 – Pippa's own EQ journey: from judgement to over-empathy to balance22:37 – Coaching a junior PM through resistance, self-doubt, and breakthrough28:40 – Leading through a forced decision: surfacing team emotion to move forward32:39 – Cultivating EQ culture: group coaching, values-based behaviours, measurement38:48 – Neurodivergence, self-awareness, and building a feedback culture44:00 – Can AI support emotional intelligence?47:41 – Is it okay to cry at work?51:29 – Self-belief as the foundation of emotional resilienceOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Elias Lieberich, Founder of Product Matters and formerly a PM at Google and YouTube, makes the case that the real gap between European and Silicon Valley product practice is in its culture. He identifies three recurring patterns in European companies: process obsession, a limited appetite for validation, and an underappreciation of engineering and design. Drawing on work with German Mittelstand businesses, deep tech startups, and large enterprises, Elias explains how to introduce product thinking without triggering resistance, through small, visible wins rather than wholesale transformation.This episode is brought to you by Mailtrap, modern email delivery for developer and product teams: fast delivery. high inboxing rates. 24/7 expert support. Try for free today.Chapters00:56 – Elias's background: Google, YouTube, and Google X04:08 – European vs. Silicon Valley product culture07:43 – Three gaps: process obsession, lack of validation, undervaluing engineers12:04 – What European companies actually want — and the copy-paste trap13:34 – Show, don't tell: finding immediate value15:37 – Bringing the whole organisation on the journey25:02 – Roadmaps, frameworks, and meeting companies where they are26:35 – Building trust through small, compounding wins29:29 – Change aversion as a bell curve31:02 – What European companies do well — and what's worth exporting33:13 – Working with deep tech startups in Europe36:44 – The killer question: who is this for?40:25 – Practical advice: start with what's within your control42:53 – Wrap-upOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Kate Tarling — consultant, trainer, and author of The Service Organization — joins Lily and Randy to discuss what it takes to deliver great services inside large, complex organizations. The conversation covers the distinction between products and services, why transformation so often stalls, how to make the business case for change using existing investment, and how product people can contribute to, and benefit from, a more service-oriented way of working.This episode is brought to you by Mailtrap, modern email delivery for developer and product teams: fast delivery. high inboxing rates. 24/7 expert support. Try for free today.Chapters00:01:30 — Introduction and Kate's background00:04:00 — Defining services vs. products00:07:00 — Product organizations vs. service organizations00:09:00 — Why service delivery is hard00:11:30 — Transformation in practice: there is no magic process00:13:30 — Starting with one area and cutting across silos00:15:30 — Common mistakes organizations make00:19:30 — Measuring progress and making the business case00:22:30 — Redirecting existing investment: a UK government example00:25:00 — Triage functions and portfolio management00:26:00 — How product people can contribute in service organizations00:30:30 — Kate's 12 principles00:34:00 — Summary00:37:00 — Examples of good service organizationsOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Rich Mironov has spent decades watching product teams lose the room because they were speaking the wrong language. In his new book Money Stories, he makes the case that product managers need a second vocabulary: one built around revenue, retention, and return. In this conversation, he walks through the core framework, why order-of-magnitude estimates beat false precision, how to build a roadmap that holds its ground against sales pressure, and what the AI moment has in common with the early days of mobile. This episode is brought to you by Mailtrap, modern email delivery for developer and product teams: fast delivery. high inboxing rates. 24/7 expert support. Try for free today.Chapters02:03 — What are money stories, and why do executives need them?03:59 — How accurate do you actually need to be? The case for order-of-magnitude thinking05:52 — Using money stories as a sorting mechanism — and how to handle the "close this deal now" pressure10:54 — Tagging roadmaps with revenue ranges and the "or principle"15:58 — Does every PM need this, or just senior leaders?21:46 — The two flavors of ROI: earning your keep vs. feature-level returns26:57 — Why feature-level ROI almost never works — and why product leaders need to push back30:33 — The story archetypes: upsell stories explained38:02 — The retention/churn story archetype41:32 — Why product people get this wrong: fear of commitment and the need to be understood44:52 — How AI changes (and doesn't change) the money story framework48:58 — How to build financial literacy as a product managerOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Laura Teclemariam has had one of the most varied careers in product — from mobile gaming economies at EA to building Netflix's animation studio from the ground up, to owning LinkedIn's core identity products. In this episode, she joins Lily and Randy to trace the through-line of her "jungle gym" path, unpack what gaming taught her about retention, why entertainment sharpens your product instincts in ways big tech can't, and how she's now teaching the next generation of PMs at UC Berkeley — with AI at the centre of everything.Chapters00:00 — Intro: The feedback you didn't see coming at LinkedIn02:00 — Laura's background: engineer, founder, consultant, PM03:50 — Why a nonlinear career is more coherent than it looks06:00 — Gaming as the most honest product environment07:20 — Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, mods, and retention crisis09:00 — How gaming metrics (DAU, retention) predicted big tech's future12:10 — Data ends debates in tech; taste ends them in entertainment13:05 — Netflix Animation: building a studio's product function from scratch15:15 — Storyboards as prototypes, animatics as MVPs19:40 — Tool consolidation: going from 400 to 130 tools across productions22:05 — Build vs. buy decisions when the budget is a feature film26:40 — What it takes to hire PMs for entertainment vs. general tech28:20 — STAR interviews and evaluating stakeholder chops29:20 — Why LinkedIn came next: curiosity about social network retention31:50 — The weight of building for 1B+ users and LinkedIn's trust-first culture35:50 — Profile, Messaging, Groups: LinkedIn's original value proposition37:00 — Teaching advanced product management at UC Berkeley38:10 — The course thesis: AI for everything, and the "great convergence"42:00 — Does the PM/design/engineering triad collapse with AI?45:30 — What Laura's students taught her about curiosity and safe-to-fail environmentsOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Corinna Stukan, Product Leader and Founder of Fintech marketplace Bizzy, lays out practical advice for connecting your product roadmap to business goals. She explains how a metrics one-pager aligns day-to-day product decisions with company goals, why understanding whether your business is in growth, acquisition or cost-control mode should shape every prioritisation call, and how to frame initiatives so stakeholders see commercial impact, not just better UX.Chapters4:00 — Why product people should care about business acumen6:01 — Organisational causes of weak commercial context for PMs8:10 — What business acumen means in practice9:10 — Wake-up story: prioritisation shifted after asking the CEO about revenue drivers11:05 — Misalignment: company goals vs team OKRs12:13 — How to run the metrics one-pager and link product to business goals14:37 — Strategy: where we are, where we’re going, how we’ll get there15:03 — Encouraging ideas while setting business context17:01 — Running collaborative bets before creating the roadmap19:20 — Communicating value: turn “better onboarding” into business impact22:08 — Avoiding over-attribution and internal attribution fights23:05 — Example: marketing’s 12 touchpoints and joint contribution to acquisition24:26 — Practising stakeholder storytelling; where LLMs help and don’t29:17 — Presentation craft: fewer slides, start with numbers, end with actions31:03 — Using LLMs for synthesis, not human insight32:06 — Reading the room: tailoring to numbers people vs story people33:51 — Final advice: discovery mindset in stakeholder meetingOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Alan Byrne, Product Leader for Mozilla’s Firefox extensions ecosystem, argues that the best product work is less doctrine and more judgement. In conversation with LRandy Silver, he breaks down why prioritisation frameworks like RICE and MoSCoW often masquerade as science while quietly embedding subjectivity—and why he prefers writing clear “what and why” statements over chasing false precision.From his experience at QuickBooks and Twitter, Alan explores when PRDs are genuinely valuable (complex systems, high risk, trust and safety concerns) and how to keep them lean enough to stay useful. The discussion also digs into the tension between moving a metric and doing right by users, the dangers of gamifying growth, and how product managers can translate customer problems into narratives that align engineers, executives, and sales.Chapters03:30 Product as philosophy04:41 Studying product vs learning in the field07:25 The real job: understand users and their “why”08:21 Why prioritisation frameworks often fail in practice10:58 Decision-making without false precision13:14 Goal-led roadmaps and narrative alignment14:22 Metrics, ethics, and avoiding gamification traps18:35 When PRDs help, and how to keep them lean22:37 Prototyping, vibe coding, and where it falls apart25:14 Communication, compromise, and working documents27:36 Preventing overbuild and defining “good enough”30:39 Handling “can’t you just…” from sales and marketing33:28 What Alan wishes he knew five years ago34:49 Explaining product management to non-product peopleOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Cheryl Platz, Cheryl Platz, former UX Director for Riot Games, Scopely and Author of "The Game Development Strategy Guide," returns to The Product Experience to explore how video game design principles can transform product development. From her time at Riot Games and Marvel Strike Force to teaching at Carnegie Mellon, Cheryl shares hard-won lessons about player motivation, onboarding, and building products that thrive. Discover why competition is no longer the primary driver of modern gaming, how a children's game taught her about gendered design assumptions, and how she turned a catastrophic server outage into a UX win that made Reddit happy.Chapters06:03 Game development is cloud services plus filmmaking07:08 The problem with silos in game studios08:24 “Modern” games: live service, messy business models, shifting tastes09:58 Defining a game: players decide if you got it right11:41 Motivators of play and why they matter to product people12:26 Disney Friends: the moment a playtest rewrote the design17:19 Classic vs modern motivators: what technology changed20:41 The research that challenged the “games are competition” assumption22:36 Why game lessons translate to enterprise software (and where gamification goes wrong)25:19 Pro-social design: trust, safety and communities at scale28:33 Designing for companionship and shared experiences34:43 Onboarding as growth strategy, not a “nice to have”37:38 Journey mapping 100 levels: making invisible drop-off visible39:25 On-demand learning beats one-and-done tutorials41:58 Advice for people trying to break into games during layoffs44:36 Turning a sixth anniversary outage into a UX win Our HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

What does alignment really mean in product teams, and why does consensus often slow everything down?In this episode of The Product Experience, Lily Smith and Randy Silver are joined by Blagoja Golubovski (VP of Product, formerly at Usercentrics) to unpack one of the most persistent myths in product leadership: that good product organisations are democracies.Chapters0:00 Product leadership is not about consensus1:21 Introduction to Blagoja2:48 From engineering to product leadership4:47 What people think product leadership is5:44 Creating clarity and explicit trade-offs6:53 Why product organisations are not democracies7:54 Input vs ownership in decision-making8:24 Who is accountable for product decisions9:50 Leadership, strategy, and prioritisation10:02 How product leadership changes as companies scale12:29 Why decision-making mechanics define product culture13:27 Separating input from decisions14:59 Committees vs accountability16:16 Why alignment does not mean agreement17:29 The three levels of product decisions21:00 Diagnosing broken decision-making22:08 Environment beats individual skill23:19 What real prioritisation looks like24:46 Hiring the wrong kind of product leaders26:31 Low-risk vs effective communication27:24 Communicating at different altitudes30:36 How PMs grow without strong leaders34:27 Why product teams still struggle to scale36:02 Judgement, coaching, and support systems38:12 Why frameworks don’t replace judgement40:04 Final advice for product managersOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

In this episode, Lily Smith and Randy Silver host Anu Jagga‑Narang, a product evangelist at AT&T, to explore premortems — a powerful technique for anticipating product failure before launch. Anu explains how premortems use prospective hindsight to uncover risks early, surface assumptions teams are reluctant to voice, and improve decision quality. The conversation covers practical steps for running premortems, risk classification using tigers, paper tigers and elephants, common pitfalls, and when to revisit the exercise as products evolve. They also examine how emerging AI capabilities influence product risk management — increasing the need for thoughtful planning rather than replacing human insight. This discussion offers product leaders a framework to strengthen strategic thinking, foster psychological safety and equip teams to build with confidence and clarity.Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Premortems01:39 Guest Introduction — Anu Jagga‑Narang02:14 Career Journey into Product05:03 What Is a Premortem?07:04 Framing Failure and Success in Premortems11:02 How to Conduct a Premortem15:04 Voting and Risk Classification17:00 Tigers, Paper Tigers, and Elephants20:22 Assigning Ownership and Actions21:28 When to Run a Premortem23:40 Who Should Participate and Duration25:14 Examples and Surprising Insights28:43 Common Mistakes and Anti‑patterns31:51 AI’s Impact on Premortems34:13 Closing Remarks and CreditsOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

In this episode of The Product Experience, host Randy Silver talks with Cristina Bustos, Product Manager and team lead at Swiss AviationSoftware, about her experience launching a native mobile application in one of the most regulated and high‑stakes industries in the world: commercial aviation.Cristina recounts how she moved from business analysis into product leadership and then navigated a gruelling product development process during the pandemic. Her team faced the dual challenge of winning over both paying customers and aviation regulators to replace paper‑based cockpit workflows with a real‑time digital solution.Chapters0:00 | Introduction and personal background 2:34 | Problem framing: launching a mobile app in aviation 4:00 | Winning founding customers before building code 6:10 | Consensus across customers and regulators 9:00 | Involving actual pilots in design 10:00 | Redesigning workflow not just digitising it 14:15 | Scope control and prioritisation 17:16 | Regulatory engagement and approval strategy 19:49 | A hackathon that wasn’t a silver bullet 21:06 | Reflections: what she would do differently 25:22 | Balancing iteration with regulatory discipline 28:21 | Triple validate in the real world 29:53 | Signals of success and business impactOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

In this episode of The Product Experience, host Lily Smith speaks with veteran product leader Sean Flaherty about a question at the heart of modern product management: how do you influence without authority? Drawing from behavioural science and decades of experience building products and teams, Sean outlines a framework based on self‑determination theory — the modern science of intrinsic motivation.Through the lens of autonomy, competence and relatedness, Sean explains why traditional command‑and‑control leadership undermines creativity and accountability. He shows how true autonomy is structured freedom, how competence is demonstrated through behaviour, and how relatedness builds trust and advocacy among teams and users. Along the way he reframes accountability as something teams hold themselves to, not something enforced by fear, and discusses how leaders can help teams grow, adapt and thrive in a world of constant change.Chapters00:00 — Introduction & central question01:30 — Guest background04:45 — State of leadership today06:10 — Intro to intrinsic motivation08:40 — The “code” of motivation12:28 — Autonomy in teams17:11 — Competence and product work20:30 — Observable behaviour and growth paths23:10 — Adaptability and learning culture24:25 — Accountability misunderstood27:04 — Accountability spectrum31:21 — Addressing negative behaviour36:19 — AI and leadership change38:01 — Leadership trends todayKey Takeaways— Motivation is scientific, not abstract— Product leaders need to understand the science of intrinsic motivation — not just processes or tools — to influence without authority and achieve sustainable outcomes.— Three core motivators drive behaviourAutonomy: people need meaningful choice, not chaos or micro‑managementCompetence: motivation increases when people feel capable and are supported to growRelatedness: connection and shared purpose power trust, loyalty and advocacy— Autonomy is structured freedom: Autonomy is not “do whatever you want”. It’s about balancing freedom with guidance so teams can be creative but not lost.— Competence is observed in behaviour, not checklists: Real competence shows up in behaviour — what people do — not just knowledge or titles.— Accountability emerges, not enforced: Traditional accountability relies on fear and external control. In contrast, self‑accountability arises when goals are meaningful and environments allow people to choose constructive behaviours.— Adaptability is the competitive edge: Like evolution, success depends on teams that learn, adapt and evolve faster than the environment changes.— Tools change — outcomes remain: Technologies such as AI shift how we work, but the goal remains the same: delivering value through motivated, empowered teams.Our HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

In this episode of The Product Experience, Mariah (Executive Director of Product at The Atlantic) discusses the often-vague transition from being a great Product Manager to becoming an effective manager of people. Drawing on her background as a journalist, Mariah explores how empathy and storytelling translate into product leadership. She deep-dives into using the Reforge PM Competency Model to remove subjectivity from performance reviews, fostering growth through "Development Conversations," and integrating AI into the PM workflow without losing the human touch.Chapters[0:00] The Pitfalls of People Management[1:15] Mariah’s Origin Story: From Journalism to Product[3:24] Product Goals at The Atlantic[4:14] Transferable Skills from Journalism[6:08] The Evolution of the News Product Industry[8:40] Why Product Leaders Struggle with Management[13:12] The Reforge Competency Framework[15:13] Running 6-Week Development Conversations[21:20] Linking Development to Pay and Promotions[22:58] Managing the Human Element of Performance[26:12] Addressing Burnout and Imposter Syndrome[28:58] Upskilling Teams in the Era of AI[31:40] AI Disruption in the News Industry[33:01] Closing and ResourcesKey Takeaways— Journalism as a Product Foundation: Skills like active listening, asking the "question behind the question," and storytelling are directly transferable to discovery and stakeholder management.— The "Liking" Trap: Effective management isn't about being liked; it is about challenging your team. Radical transparency often leads to more long-term gratitude than avoiding uncomfortable conversations.— Structured Development: Using a competency framework turns vague performance evaluations into objective, actionable growth plans.— The 6-Week Pulse: Dedicated "Development Conversations" every six weeks help track progress and adjust goals in real-time, far beyond the utility of an annual review.— Protecting Focus: "Focus Fridays" (no-meeting days) are essential for PMs to escape the "weeds" and execute high-value work.Our HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Product managers are saving hours with AI, yet feel more uncertain than ever about whether their products will succeed. What’s going on?In this episode of The Product Experience, Lily Smith and Randy Silver sit down with Axel Sooriah, product management evangelist at Atlassian, to unpack the findings from a large-scale survey into the state of product management today.Axel shares why so many teams are stuck on the hamster wheel of execution, how cross-functional collaboration still breaks down in practice, and why 84% of product managers doubt their products will succeed despite loving the craft. The conversation explores the real reasons behind PM anxiety, the role of leadership in creating confidence, and how reframing work around customer progress can re-energise teams.Chapters00:00 – Money, motivation, and product work01:12 – Axel Sooriah’s product background02:16 – What a product management evangelist does05:38 – Why Atlassian ran the state of product management survey07:01 – AI productivity and the strategy time paradox11:32 – The hamster wheel of execution14:01 – Leadership, incentives, and product manager agency16:16 – Using AI in customer discovery18:17 – Cross-functional collaboration in practice22:06 – Why 84% of product managers doubt success26:16 – Discovery, evidence, and decision-making confidence28:47 – Fear and curiosity in the age of AI30:50 – Getting started with AI as a product manager32:54 – Profit focus and product team motivation34:27 – Reframing product work around customer progress36:49 – Advice for product managers todayKey takeaways — Product managers are exhausted by execution, not strategy— Even when AI frees up time, that capacity is quickly consumed by more delivery work.— Cross-functional teams don’t guarantee collaboration— Engineers are still excluded early, which kills creativity and confidence.— Doubt comes from lack of evidence— When teams don’t have time for discovery, decision-making confidence collapses.— AI is a lever, not a solution— Its real value is reclaiming time and enabling better thinking, not just faster output.— Motivation comes from customer progress, not metrics— Revenue matters, but meaning comes from helping people move forward in their lives.— Agency matters more than permission— Product managers cannot wait for perfect conditions to do good product work.— Be intentional about the PM you want to become— Growth requires stepping off the hamster wheel and choosing where to invest energy.Featured Links: Follow Axel on LinkedIn | Axel's website | Atlassian | 'What we learned at Industry conferenOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

In this episode of the Product Experience Podcast, we speak with Kasia Chmielinski, co-founder of The Data Nutrition Project, who discusses their work on responsible AI, data quality, and the Data Nutrition Project. Kasia highlights the importance of balancing innovation with ethical considerations in product management, the challenges of working within large organizations like the UN, and the need for transparency in data usage. Featured Links: Follow Kasia on LinkedIn | The Data Nutrition Project | 'What we learned at Pendomonium and #mtpcon 2024 Raleigh: Day 2' feature by Louron PrattOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

What does it take to build truly product-driven engineering teams? In this episode, Matt Watson — founder and CEO of Full Scale and author of Product Driven — joins Lily and Randy to challenge the longstanding silos between product and engineering. Drawing on 25+ years of experience and four tech ventures, Matt makes the case for why developers need more than just code to care about: they need context, ownership, and clarity.From redefining “done” to the evolving role of AI in software teams, this conversation dives into how product leaders can foster a culture where engineers aren't just implementers, but co-creators of customer value.Chapters0:00 – Why “no feedback” is a warning sign, not success1:46 – Matt’s journey: from developer to founder2:58 – Thinking outside the code: how the book Product Driven started4:50 – Why many engineers don’t think about the customer5:57 – The rise of product managers and the walling off of engineers6:56 – Redefining the role of PMs in cross-functional teams9:01 – Metrics, measurement, and the illusion of progress10:57 – Ownership as the root of productivity13:04 – Code monkeys, culture, and killing creativity14:55 – Communicating context: five minutes that save weeks17:04 – AI and the changing definition of developer productivity20:32 – External value vs internal tech debt22:48 – The Product Driven model: Vision, Focus, Clarity, Shared Ownership, Courage27:08 – Why courage is the starting point for change31:09 – The blurred lines of product and engineering33:03 – What makes a 10x developer?35:25 – The importance of clarity in the age of AI36:01 – The four types of engineering leaders38:22 – How Full Scale hires for curiosity, not just coding skillsKey Takeaways“Ship and forget” is a failure mode. Lack of feedback means missed learning — not success.Redefine ‘done’. It’s not when the code is committed; it’s when the customer experiences value.Clarity beats ceremony. Agile rituals mean little without shared context and purpose.10x is about friction, not genius. The most productive engineers aren’t just skilled — they’re empowered, trusted, and aligned.Product-driven teams require courage. From engineers speaking up, to PMs giving up control, psychological safety fuels innovation.Engineers need to know the why. Without understanding customer impact, even brilliant code becomes meaningless.AI raises the bar on thinking. Execution is easier — now value creation is what separates teams.This episode is brought to you by Bolt.new — the product manager’s secret weapon to protoOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

In this episode, Prerna Singh, CPTO at Avaaz, walks us through how AI is reshaping the way we prototype, learn and build digital products. Rather than replacing teams or skipping straight to production, she argues that AI shines when used as a “thought partner” to accelerate early‑stage experimentation. Through her own journey building a community platform on weekends, she demonstrates how tools like ChatGPT, Lovable (and later Claude / Replet) and Figma AI enabled her to move from blank page to clickable prototype in hours — while retaining the human insight, iteration and context that underpin good product work. The conversation reframes common assumptions about “fast‑AI = bypass human work,” and instead proposes a balanced adoption path: start in “sandbox mode,” learn and play — before graduating to “architect mode” where the real value to business begins.Chapters00:00 – Introduction & AI’s impact on product cycles01:43 – Meet Prerna Singh: her background in product and community building03:50 – The community problem: logistics over connection05:11 – Turning to AI to solve her own problem06:50 – What AI can’t do: user insight and human judgment08:08 – From waterfall to short-cycle prototyping10:54 – Using ChatGPT as a Socratic thought partner13:07 – Working solo vs team: where AI fits17:17 – From prompt to prototype: using Lovable19:06 – Iterating with Figma AI and other tools23:00 – Real feedback from real users25:02 – Creating a feedback knowledge base with AI26:16 – AI vs design sprints: same principles, new tools30:36 – Sandbox mode vs architect mode36:48 – Bringing AI into the team culture at Avaaz38:49 – CEO buy-in and grassroots experimentation39:52 – Closing reflections: product joy, pain, and playKey Takeaways— AI accelerates, but doesn’t replace human judgment. Tools like ChatGPT can rapidly prototype flows, but they cannot yet replace user insight or reflect true behavioural outcomes.— Use a “sandbox mode” before “architect mode.” Give teams permission to play and experiment with AI — rather than expecting immediate business ROI — to surface real potential and build confidence.— AI can democratise early product work. Product managers can rapidly build prototypes without waiting on design or engineering hand‑offs, enabling faster discovery and validation cycles.— Prototypes—especially interactive ones—drive better conversations. Showing a working prototype sparks more meaningful feedback and generates concrete ideas than dry requirement documents.— Treat AI as a “thought partner,” not a magic bullet. Use AI to challenge assumptions, generate structure, document learnings — but always apply human oversight, iteration and context.— ProvingOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

In this episode of The Product Experience, host Randy Silver speaks with Teresa Huang — Head of Product for Enablement at global health‑insurer Bupa — about the often‑overlooked world of platform product management. They explore why building internal platforms is fundamentally different and often more challenging than building user‑facing products, how to measure the value of platform work, and practical strategies for gaining stakeholder alignment, driving platform adoption and demonstrating business impact.Chapters0:00 – Why “efficiency” alone no longer cuts it — measuring platform impact in business terms1:02 – Teresa’s background: from business analyst to head of product in health insurance6:20 – What we mean by “platform product management” — internal tools vs marketplace vs public‑API platforms7:44 – Why you need to “hop two steps”: address developer needs and end-customer value10:24 – Types of platforms: internal APIs, marketplace ecosystems, public‑facing platforms (e.g. like Shopify)10:55 – Reframing platform work: building business cases instead of chasing “efficiency” metrics13:16 – Linking platform initiatives to core business goals and joint OKRs15:47 – The importance of visualisation — using prototypes and role‑plays to communicate platform value20:57 – Internal showcases: keeping stakeholders engaged with real‑world scenarios23:28 – Success metrics for platforms: adoption, usage, reliability, ecosystem growth26:00 – Retiring legacy services: deciding when low-use tools should be decommissioned28:55 – From cost centre to enabler: shifting the narrative to show value creationOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

In this episode of The Product Experience, host Randy Silver sits down with product veteran John Cutler to explore why creating great products remains one of the hardest things organisations do. They dive into why so many companies adopt off‑the‑shelf models (“Spotify”, “SAFe”, etc) and still struggle, and how the secret often lies not in what you build but how you build it—specifically the game you design for how you work.Chapters00:00 — The stigma around “how you work”00:54 — Introducing John Cutler (again)01:25 — What John’s building at Dotwork02:46 — From fun to formal: doing discovery at scale04:04 — Why process became a bad word05:10 — The “cavalier PM” mindset06:28 — Empowered teams vs. harsh realities08:00 — What great pockets of practice have in common09:03 — Managing up vs. doing the right thing10:24 — Playing the game vs. designing the game11:20 — What makes a great internal game12:33 — Defining success: thriving, surviving, progressing13:46 — Environmental design: why leaders hesitate15:10 — Making intentional design less intimidating16:42 — Tools, rituals, and the power of checkpoints18:23 — The behaviour design playbook20:41 — Removing blockers: access, repetition, reflection22:12 — Replayability and the value of feedback loops23:29 — Fixing the finance game25:20 — Creating local spheres of trust26:27 — Starting with behaviours, not frameworks28:01 — Diagnosing blockers with behaviour design29:53 — Identifying anti-patterns with TRIZ31:08 — The myth of corporate rationality33:19 — When no complaints doesn’t mean no problems34:13 — Closing thoughts: are you playing the right game?Featured Links: Follow John on LinkedIn | Dotwork | John's keynote and feature from INDUSTRY Conference Cleveland 2025 at Mind The ProductOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

In this episode, Nina Olding, Staff Product Manager at Weights & Biases and formerly at Google DeepMind, working on trust and compliance for AI, joins Randy to explore the UX challenges of AI‑driven features. As AI becomes increasingly woven into digital products, the traditional UX cues and trust‑signals that users rely on are changing. Nina introduces her framework of the three “A’s” for AI UX: Awareness, Agency, and Assurance, and explains how product teams can build this into their AI‑enabled products without launching a massive transformation programme.Key Takeaways— As AI features proliferate, the UX challenge is less about the technology and more about how users perceive, understand and trust the interactions.— Trust is based on three foundational dimensions for AI‑enabled products: Awareness, Agency, Assurance.— Awareness: Make it clear when AI is involved (and when it isn’t). Invisible AI = risk of misunderstanding. Magical AI without context = disorientation.— Agency: Give users control, or at least the option to opt‑out, define boundaries, choose defaults vs advanced settings.— Assurance: Because AI can be non‑deterministic, you must design for confidence—indicators of reliability, transparency about limitations, ability to question or override outputs.Chapters00:00 – Intro: Why AI products are failing on trust00:47 – Nina Old’s journey from Google DeepMind to Weights & Biases03:20 – The UX of AI: It's not just a chat window04:08 – Introducing the Three A’s framework: Awareness, Agency, Assurance08:30 – Designing for Awareness: Visibility and user signals14:40 – Agency: Giving users control and escape hatches21:30 – Assurance: Transparency, confidence indicators, and humility28:05 – Three key questions to assess AI UX30:50 – The product case for trust: Compliance, loyalty, and retention33:00 – Final thoughts: Building the trust muscleFeatured Links: Follow Nina on LinkedIn | Weights & Biases | Check out Nina's 'The hidden UX of AI' slides from Industry Conference Cleveland 2025Our HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

In this episode of The Product Experience, Lily Smith speaks with Vidya Dinamani, product veteran, coach, and Co-founder of Product Rebels, about how to tell if your team is truly product-led or just paying lip service. With over a decade of experience coaching hundreds of teams, Vidya shares her insights into the critical elements of product maturity, the most overlooked barriers to effective product work, and how Product Rebels' diagnostic framework is helping companies move from chaos to clarity. Chapters00:00 – The customer conversation gap01:28 – Meet Vidya Dinamani and Product Rebels03:35 – Why they built a diagnostic, not an assessment04:45 – Mindsets, competencies, and the missing piece: resources06:28 – AI readiness: the new fourth pillar07:40 – What it really means to be product-led09:59 – How teams are using the diagnostic13:10 – Breaking down the four pillars16:01 – Why access to customers remains a key obstacle17:38 – Patterns, or lack thereof, in product maturity20:26 – AI readiness in context23:59 – A case study: product maturity at scale27:52 – Final thoughts on assessment vs namingWhat we learned from Vidya Most product teams lack customer access: 70–80% of PMs Product Rebels encounter say they’ve never spoken to a customer.Being product-led requires more than intent: It demands mindset, core competencies, supportive resources—and now AI readiness.Diagnostic, not assessment: Their tool isn’t about performance reviews; it’s a heat map that reveals where to begin your transformation.AI is not a bolt-on: AI readiness is most effective when integrated into the broader product maturity conversation, not treated as a silo.Start with one thing: Rather than trying to become product-led across the board, identify a single focus area and build momentum from there.Internal PMs need customer framing too: Even teams building internal platforms need customer advocacy and insight.Featured Links: Follow Vidya on LinkedIn | Product Rebels Our HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Building the right thing is hard. Building the wrong thing is easy and costly. In this episode, Jason Sparks, Principal Product Manager at ReUp Education, dives deep into the discipline of continuous validation inside enterprise environments. From managing stakeholder pressure to proactively engaging customers in discovery, Jason shares battle-tested approaches for avoiding the classic trap of solution-first thinking.Chapters0:00 – The risk of unvalidated assumptions1:02 – Meet Jason Sparks and his mission at ReUp3:02 – From college dropout to product leader5:19 – Product-market fit inside the enterprise6:03 – Why most ideas don’t need building8:10 – Misalignment: wrong product, wrong market10:05 – Executive interference and assumption management12:33 – Validation is not a one-off14:44 – Continuous discovery in practice15:38 – How to validate enterprise product ideas17:02 – Story decks, user interviews and field testing19:11 – Grading feedback and customer fit21:11 – The danger of over-friendly users23:08 – The power of early champions25:21 – Preparing for and running discovery sessions27:35 – Value testing and competitor awareness29:08 – When to walk away from the wrong customer31:17 – What happens after the meetings33:30 – The role of AI in user research35:46 – What Jason would do differently todayWhat you'll learn from Jason— Validation should be continuous: One round of user feedback isn’t enough. Real product-market fit evolves through repeated conversations and iteration.— Assumptions must be challenged: Build a culture where being proven wrong is celebrated, not feared.— Don’t let leadership derail discovery: Product managers must set boundaries and bring clarity on the problem space before execution begins.— Grading users is as critical as grading feedback: Identify the right customers to listen to—being nice isn’t the same as being the right fit.— Use discovery decks to guide conversations: Jason uses bold assumptions, interactive sessions, and immediate iteration to refine ideas quickly.— Tech accelerates, but doesn’t replace, human insight: AI tools for sentiment and semantic analysis are powerful but should supplement—not substitute—real human interaction.Featured Links: Follow Jason on LinkedIn | Jason's website Sparksopedia | ReUp EducationOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Why do great product ideas fail to gain traction? According to Elena Luna, it’s rarely about the strategy and more often about the storytelling. In this episode of The Product Experience, Elena Luneva, a seasoned CPO, GM, and Maven instructor, joins Randy Silver live from INDUSTRY 2025 to explore how product leaders can better communicate the why behind their product decisions. What we learned from Elena— Speaking 'User' isn’t enough – Executives care about business impact, not just engagement metrics.— Translate features to financials – Frame product initiatives in terms of ARPU, opex savings, or revenue impact.— Use storytelling with data – Combine real user insights with projections to make your case.— Seasonality matters – Product testing should account for time-of-year and market behaviour.— Align go-to-market early – Synchronising product and sales is key to driving measurable outcomes.— Ask better questions – Start with: What is it? Why does it matter? How much will it cost? When will we get it?Chapters 2:45 – The Ceiling for Great PMs4:09 – Speaking Executive5:22 – Case Study: Nextdoor Maps9:52 – Translating Engagement to Revenue10:49 – Embedding Finance into Product Thinking12:43 – Pivoting During COVID14:36 – Business Fluency at All Levels16:00 – Building Context Across Teams18:26 – The Four Questions20:06 – Thinking in Horizons22:43 – Shifting Accountability26:23 – CPMO vs. CPTO27:43 – Common Mistakes29:42 – Seasonality & Cannibalisation32:29 – Practical First Steps34:21 – Credits & OutroFeatured Links: Follow Elena on LinkedIn | Elena's Substack | Industry Conference Cleveland 2025 recap at Mind The Product | Sign up to Elena's coaching course Our HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

In this episode of The Product Experience, Lily and Randy speak with Dan Dalton (Director of Product Management at Sage) about the current state of product management, and how the role must evolve in today’s climate.Chapters0:00 Introduction: product management at a crossroads1:00 Dan Dalton’s background and path into product3:00 The evolution of product management: 2010 to today8:15 Framework‐fundamentalism, the broken ladder & career expectations13:45 Why many product careers are being set up to fail19:20 Responding to disruption: returning to basics, focusing on impact24:40 The role of soft skills and mindset in product leadership28:55 How Dan’s team operates: fast prototyping, design system, code assets31:10 Hiring and developing product talent: soft skills over tick‐boxes35:30 AI, hype and bubbles: what product leaders need to keep in mind40:15 The mental flywheel: pragmatism, curiosity, resilience, detachment45:00 Wrap up & closing remarksFeatured Links: Follow Dan on LinkedIn | Sage | 'Why is everyone hating on Product Managers?' feature by Peter YangOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

You can’t build great products on gut instinct, and yet, according to IBM’s global study of 1,000 enterprises, 77% of organisations using generative AI aren’t seeing any financial benefit. In this episode on The Product Experience podcast, Lily Smith sits down with Matthew Certner, Digital Product Engineering and Design Partner at IBM, to unpack the four key traits that drive ROI in AI-powered product teams: flexibility, incremental and targeted delivery, data-led decisions, and cross-functional collaboration. Recorded live at the Industry conference, this conversation offers practical lessons for any product leader navigating the hype and reality of AI adoption. Chapters00:00 – The danger of building on gut instinct00:37 – IBM’s global study on generative and agentic AI adoption01:00 – Meet Matthew Certner, Digital Product Engineering Partner at IBM02:00 – Why most enterprises aren’t realising ROI from AI04:50 – What the top-performing 20% of companies do differently05:10 – The four key behaviours driving success07:00 – Flexibility: adapting quickly to market feedback08:10 – Incremental and targeted delivery — the “golden thread” principle10:30 – Data-led decision-making versus the HIPPO effect11:45 – Cross-functional collaboration and robust adoption13:10 – Behavioural factors that make or break AI adoption14:20 – Inside IBM’s “value orchestration” framework15:10 – The Golden Thread in practice — a sticky-note story from Dallas17:10 – Transparency and traceability in product development18:00 – How IBM helps teams that aren’t seeing value from AI21:00 – The paradox of moving too fast or too slow with AI24:00 – Making the Golden Thread a living document25:20 – Inside IBM Garage: speed of a startup, scale of an enterprise27:40 – Why productivity savings, not hype, drive AI ROI29:00 – How large organisations structure innovation teams30:00 – The future: 800 million new products by 202631:00 – Why 95% will fail — and what the 5% will get right33:10 – Final reflections: value, purpose and the human elementFeatured Links: Follow Matthew on LinkedIn | IBM Garage | Industry Conference Cleveland 2025 recap at Mind The ProductOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Christian Idiodi, Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, and Co-author of the valuable product book Transformed, dismantles some of the most persistent myths in product leadership. Drawing from his global perspective and work across Africa’s fast-emerging tech ecosystem, Christian makes the case for a new kind of leadership, one grounded in clarity, context, and radical trust.Chapters00:00 — The environment, not the people02:00 — Building product leadership in Africa06:00 — Stories of impact10:00 — What real leadership means14:00 — Managing minds, not hands19:00 — The “first team” mindset23:00 — Focus, not prioritisation25:00 — Scaling and the myth of process29:00 — AI and the redefinition of excellence35:00 — Creating space for practice40:00 — Product crits and leadership feedback41:30 — Inspire Africa ConferenceKey Takeaways— Better outcomes start with better environments. Leadership is about designing the conditions for people to do their best work — not managing their output.— Africa is building for Africa, by Africans. The Inspire Africa Conference is catalysing coaching, capital, and community to accelerate meaningful innovation.— Strategy defines focus. If prioritisation is hard, the strategy probably isn’t real.— Leadership is a different sport. Managing people’s minds, not hands, requires context, clarity, and trust — not control.— AI won’t replace good leaders. But it might replace bad leadership. Judgment, product sense, and curiosity are the new differentiators.— Create practice space. Growth requires safety to make mistakes, experiment, and learn — at every level of the organisation.— Critique is culture. Teams that coach and critique together develop sharper thinking and stronger product judgment.Featured Links: Follow Christian on LinkedIn | Silicon Valley Product Group | Inspire Africa Our HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

In this episode of The Product Experience, Lily Smith speaks with Sahil Jain, co-founder and CEO of Samepage.ai, about one of product management’s hardest challenges: keeping teams aligned. From his early career at Yahoo and AOL to founding multiple startups, Sahil shares lessons on building products that tackle “unsolvable” problems like communication and alignment. He explains why shared understanding matters more than speed, how product managers can become better storytellers, and why early-stage startups should obsess over just a handful of teams before chasing scale.Chapters0:00 – Why alignment is so hard1:14 – Sahil’s unconventional career path4:00 – First foray into startups at AOL and beyond6:50 – Founding AdStage and lessons from raising early capital9:00 – Moving into product leadership after acquisition12:53 – On delusion, motivation, and tackling “unsolvable” problems16:34 – Starting Samepage.ai and the problem of information asymmetry22:43 – Validating the problem and testing prototypes27:22 – Why product managers are the perfect early adopters29:20 – The first 10 obsessed teams: startup focus34:00 – Neurodivergence, communication, and shared understanding36:43 – From Claude Shannon to storytelling: frameworks for better communication39:59 – Lessons from Duolingo on multimodal learning41:19 – Where to find Samepage.aiFeatured Links: Follow Sahil on LinkedIn | Samepage.ai | 'What we learned at Industry conference - day one' feature by Louron Pratt at Mind the ProductOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

In this episode of The Product Experience, hosts Lily Smith and Randy Silver speak with Damilola Adelekan, Lead Product Manager at Remedial Health, who discusses building pragmatic, people-centred solutions in Africa’s fragmented and under-resourced healthcare system.  Chapters05:30 – Early Lessons from Volunteering and Nonprofits07:00 – Why Digitising a Broken System Isn’t Enough10:00 – Tackling Trust, Funding, and Fragmentation in Healthcare12:30 – Collaborating Beyond the Organisation14:30 – Building a Full Healthcare Supply Chain16:00 – Pragmatism Over Perfection in Product Vision18:00 – Cross-Team Collaboration at Scale20:00 – Structuring Product Work Across Functions22:00 – Communications Tips for Cross-Functional Leadership24:00 – Increasing Tech Adoption Among Low-Digital-Literacy Users26:00 – Customer Research in Low-Tech Contexts28:00 – Voice of the Customer: Calls, Feedback, and Sales Teams30:00 – What Inspires a Product Manager in Nigeria?Featured Links: Follow Damilola on LinkedIn | Remedial Health | Inspire Africa | 'How I got my job in product' feature with Damilola at Mind The ProductOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

In this episode of The Product Experience, Patrick Ndjientcheu, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Irembo, shares how his team transitioned from delivering projects for government to building a portfolio of scalable products. Patrick talks about shifting mindsets from execution to strategy, spinning out payments and identity into independent products, and the challenges of balancing internal bias with customer needs. He also reveals how Irembo is evolving into a super app, why sales enablement is crucial in a B2B context, and the lessons he has learned guiding teams through the move from project to product to product portfolio.Six things we learned from PatrickProject to product mindset: Repeat customer demand signals value, turn ad-hoc projects into structured products with identity, principles, and strategy.Team restructuring without turnover: Shifting from project delivery to product development requires reorganising teams around capabilities.Spinouts emerge from features: Payments and identity started as embedded features, but with scale and external demand, became standalone products.Bias is real: Teams naturally over-index on the dominant revenue product. Separation, customer interviews, and rebranding are critical to balance focus.Sales enablement matters: Without educating sales and customers on new platform capabilities, adoption stalls and value is under-communicated.Leadership lesson: Product leaders must bring the whole organisation on the journey—marketing, sales, finance, and operations—not just product teams.Featured Links: Follow Patrick on LinkedIn | Irembo | Inspire Africa Our HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

In this episode of The Product Experience, Lily Smith speaks with Sally Foote, a seasoned product leader whose journey from product roles to C-suite commercial leadership spans Carwow, Go Compare, and The Guardian. They unpack the increasingly vital intersection between product, marketing, and sales.Sally explains why growth is a shared responsibility, how product managers can become commercially fluent, and why understanding marketing economics is now critical. Expect actionable advice on working across functions, owning growth levers, and designing products that fuel acquisition and retention. Whether you’re in B2B or B2C, there’s something in here for every product leader looking to elevate their commercial impact.Key Takeaways:— Modern product managers must understand marketing funnels, ROI, and acquisition costs to create scalable impact.— Propositions beat PPC: In saturated digital channels, differentiation must come from product innovation.— Stop the handoffs: A strict separation between product, marketing, and sales creates missed opportunities and inefficiencies.— Product roadmaps matter to the business: While sometimes shunned by PMs, roadmaps help align and activate sales and marketing functions.— Product marketing isn't enough: What’s needed is cross-functional growth thinking—not just better product copy.— B2B is a rich source of insights: Embedding PMs in sales cycles and advisory panels unlocks product innovation directly from the source.— AI is reshaping go-to-market: From focus groups to pricing strategies, machine learning is changing how teams make commercial decisions.— Your funnel is only as good as your data: PMs should design products with marketing data needs in mind to drive better acquisition performance.Featured Links: Follow Sally on LinkedIn | YourRoom AI focus group | Carwow | Watch Sally's 'Maximum Possible Products' talk at #mtpcon London 2019 | Sustainable living made easy with Bower Collective Our HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Product decisions built on daily-active metrics fall apart when your customers show up once a year, or once a decade. In this episode, Randy Silver talks to Vivek Kumar about building and growing low-frequency products, from property and tax to jobs and dating. Chapters04:25 — What makes a product “infrequent”? Episodic use and recall decay07:05 — Rethinking PMF: penetration and market share over retention curves10:36 — When iteration is slow: prioritising problems under seasonal cycles14:28 — BELT framework: behaviours, enduring vs transient problems, lock-ins21:56 — Spotting enduring problems: “what will still matter in 10 years?”24:11 — ICE framework overview for infrequent products26:03 — Engagement: active retention, complexity, single- vs constant-touch29:55 — Predictable vs unpredictable retention; referrals as a strategy31:06 — Lifetime retention: seeding frequency hooks (e.g., estimates, salary data)33:01 — Distinctiveness and brand: why CAC collapses when you own the memory33:48 — Control over experience: monetisation through end-to-end journeys36:13 — Research that works: ethnography, diary studies, “follow-me-home”40:22 — Example: discovering the real tax filing pain (document collection)43:04 — Ethics and value: “cures vs treatments”, utility vs entertainment productsFeatured Links: Follow Vivek on LinkedIn | Atlys | The Steps 'Grow and manage low frequency products' course | The ICED theory growing infrequent products blog at ReforgeOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.