The Product Experience

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

Lessons from Games, Big Tech, & Hollywood - Laura Teclemariam (LinkedIn, Netflix, Warner Bros. Entertainment) 04.03.2026 50min

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 — wi...

How to align product work to business goals | Corinna Stukan (CEO, Bizzy) 25.02.2026 37min

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. Chapters 4:00 — Why product people...

Lessons from Firefox and Twitter - Alan Byrne (Product Leader, Mozilla) 18.02.2026 36min

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 (com...

Inside modern game design - Cheryl Platz (Riot Games, Microsoft) 16.02.2026 51min

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...

Product democracy doesn't work - Blagoja Golubovski (VP Product, Usercentrics) 04.02.2026 42min

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. Chapters 0:00 Product leadership is not about consensus 1:21 Introduction to Blagoja 2:48 From engineering to product leadership 4:47...

How to use Premortems to predict failure - Anu Jagga-Narang (AT&T) 28.01.2026 34min

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,...

Building products for pilots: a case study - Cristina Bustos (Swiss AviationSoftware) 21.01.2026 33min

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 winni...