The Product Experience

Episodi

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

  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. 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 an...
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  Building trust pays off - Simonetta Batteiger (Product Leadership Coach) 15.07.2026 36min

  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. 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 an...
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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

  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. 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 an...
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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. 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 ye...
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  AI ate their search traffic. Here's what Springer Nature built instead — Prathik Roy 29.04.2026 40min

  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, an...
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  How to connect vision, strategy, and execution - Martin Eriksson (Author, The Decision Stack) 22.04.2026 45min

  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 l...
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  The document that can replace PRDs — Rags Vadali (Founder & CEO, floto.ai) 15.04.2026 42min

  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 ...
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  What I learned from an industry pivot - Kate Kempe (Director of Product, International Baccalaureate) 08.04.2026 40min

  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 ...
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  How to build EQ as a Product Leader - Pippa Topp (CPO, giffgaff) 01.04.2026 57min

  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 ...
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  The state of product in Europe - Elias Lieberich (Product Strategy Coach) 25.03.2026 43min

  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 thin...
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  How to fix broken systems - Kate Tarling (CEO, The Service Group) 18.03.2026 40min

  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 Ma...
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  How to communicate the value of product work - Rich Mironov (CPO Coach) 11.03.2026 52min

  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 e...