The Product Experience

Jaksot

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  What is AI product management, really? Jonathan Evens (AI Product Lead, Google DeepMind) 16.09.2026 42min

  Jonathan Evens is a product lead at Google DeepMind, where he has spent more than a decade applying machine learning and AI across industries — from the smart grid at AutoGrid, to detecting roads and buildings from satellite imagery at Planet, to recommender systems, Google Search's AI Overviews and AI Mode, and now live avatars. He is also an advisor to the Evens Foundation, where he is building a "digital citizenry": a democracy sandbox that uses synthetic citizens to pre-test how the publi...
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  What I learned from building, and exiting a startup — Kirsten Mann (Strategic Advisor) 09.09.2026 51min

  Kirsten Mann is a board director, product leader and, with this episode, a three-time guest on the podcast. Last time she was here, she was building Vizory, an AI tool that helps company directors get through board packs. This time she's back to explain why she isn't building it any more. Talking to Randy Silver, she walks through exiting Vizory, the friction tests she ran before writing a line of code, and why she now believes distribution, not the build, is where most AI products actually d...
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  How to position your product for a future nobody can predict - April Dunford (Author of Obviously Awesome) 02.09.2026 37min

  April Dunford is the positioning expert behind Obviously Awesome and a former repeat vice-president of marketing across seven venture-backed startups, most of which were acquired. Over the past decade she has advised roughly 300 B2B technology companies, all with sales teams, on how to position themselves against the competition. In this episode she joins hosts Lily Smith and Randy Silver to explain why so many companies are repositioning at once, how a strong point of view on the future unde...
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  Four mistakes scaling teams make - Julia Barham (Author and Product Executive) 26.08.2026 43min

  Julia Barham leads a CX acquisition team at Progressive Insurance and is the author of The Product Management Playbook, published by Rosenfeld Media in July 2026. She wrote it to close what she sees as a coaching gap in the profession: a decade of product transformations has produced far more people with the title than people who have been taught end-to-end craft. In this episode she makes the case for treating ambiguity as a condition of the job rather than a problem to be solved, and walks ...
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  How to lead a product team through AI adoption - Tiama Hanson-Drury (CPTO, Opus 2) 19.08.2026 39min

  Tiama Hanson-Drury is CPTO at Opus 2, the legal technology company behind the systems that run some of the world's largest and most high-stakes litigation. She started her career in sales, moved into product in 2010 and has spent the last 16 years split roughly evenly between individual contributor and leadership roles. Her verdict on AI in product organisations is neither evangelism nor scepticism: the tooling has removed software as a bottleneck, but the markers of quality that mattered bef...
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  What OpenAI taught me to unlearn — Blaine Billingsley (OpenAI, Slack, YouTube, Airbnb) 12.08.2026 55min

  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 th...
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  What your developers aren't telling you - Cat Hicks (Psychologist) 05.08.2026 49min

  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, bri...
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  The new manifesto for product builders - Faith Forster (Chief Product Officer) 29.07.2026 44min

  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-disciplinar...
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  5 human signals AI won't replicate - Sarah McDevitt (Hubspot) 22.07.2026 43min

  We're refreshing The Product Experience and want your input. Take our two-minute survey and help shape where the show goes next! Our Hosts Lily 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. Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Cons...
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  Building trust pays off - Simonetta Batteiger (Product Leadership Coach) 15.07.2026 36min

  We're refreshing The Product Experience and want your input. Take our two-minute survey and help shape where the show goes next! Our Hosts Lily 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. Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Cons...
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  Why is product so hard? - Charity Ibhadon (Global Product Director, WPP) 08.07.2026 27min

  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 mad...
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  Move fast and DON'T break things - Vonny Laing (UX Lead, Student Loans Company) 01.07.2026 42min

  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 majorit...
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  A deep dive into the state of product in 2026 — Emily Tate (VP Product) 24.06.2026 34min

  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 fre...
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  How to build resilience in product - Lindsey Jayne (Product Advisor) 18.06.2026 28min

  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. Chapters 00:00 — Introduction 01:08 — Lindsey's origin story: from a broken gove...
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  How to get the most out of product coaching - Lily Smith (Managing Director, BBC Maestro) and Randy Silver (Product and Leadership Coach) 10.06.2026 33min

  We're refreshing The Product Experience and want your input. Take our two-minute survey and help shape where the show goes next! Our Hosts Lily 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. Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Cons...
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  How to lead when you don't fit in - Dave Martin (CPO, Fractional) 03.06.2026 43min

  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...
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  Why you're not falling behind on AI - Barry O'Reilly (Author, Artificial Organizations) 27.05.2026 48min

  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 transformati...
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  How PMs can win with open source - Dan Ciruli (Product Leader, Nutanix) 20.05.2026 41min

  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 membe...
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  What I learned from unbuilding products and systems in the Public Sector - Ayushi Roy (Product Leader) 13.05.2026 44min

  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. Draw...
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  Everything you need to know about product messaging— Diane Wiredu (B2B, SaaS, Marketing, leader) 06.05.2026 41min

  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. We're refreshing The Product Experience and want your input. Take our two-minute survey and help shape where the show goes next! Our Hosts Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage an...