Podcast · Tech & Science

The Product Experience: a Mind the Product podcast

by Mind the Product · English · Tech & Science

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 43 min
Latest: 6 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

6 Oct 2026 · 43 min

Evals, Analytics, and How to escape the feature factory: Francois Lopitaux (SVP Product Management, ThoughtSpot)

Francois Lopitaux is SVP of Product at ThoughtSpot, the analytics company built on the premise that you should be able to search your data like you search Google. He began his product career 18 years ago, when Salesforce acquired his Paris company, and went on to lead customer service, analytics and AI products there before joining two startups and then ThoughtSpot. He joins Randy Silver to explain how building agentic products differs from shipping deterministic software, from designing with...

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

30 Sep 2026 · 44 min

Four questions to ask before building AI into your product — Kendra Vant (Chief Product Officer, Tapi)

When you use an AI tool, how much time do you spend correcting it? And would your customers be willing to do the same? Kendra Vant, Chief Product Officer at Tapi, joins Randy Silver to explore the “reliability layer”: the people, checks and engineering that make AI products dependable. She explains why enthusiastic AI users often provide that layer themselves, and why product teams can’t assume their customers will. Kendra shares four questions to ask before building AI into your product, fro...
23 Sep 2026 · 35 min

How to fix your product roadmap — Matt Feczko (Director of Product Ops, Ocado Technology)

Matt Feczko is director of product operations at Ocado, the UK grocery technology company whose warehouse robots and delivery automation now run for retailers including Kroger in the US and Coles in Australia. He spent the first half of his career as a customer-facing product manager, starting on SharePoint and Office at Microsoft before moving to the UK to join Skype and then four different startups over six years. A LinkedIn recruiter's typo — dropping a comma from his job title — led him t...
16 Sep 2026 · 43 min

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

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...
9 Sep 2026 · 52 min

What I learned from building, and exiting a startup — Kirsten Mann (Strategic Advisor)

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...
2 Sep 2026 · 38 min

How to position your product for a future nobody can predict - April Dunford (Author of Obviously Awesome)

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...
26 Aug 2026 · 43 min

Four mistakes scaling teams make - Julia Barham (Author and Product Executive)

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 ...
19 Aug 2026 · 39 min

How to lead a product team through AI adoption - Tiama Hanson-Drury (CPTO, Opus 2)

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...
12 Aug 2026 · 56 min

What OpenAI taught me to unlearn — Blaine Billingsley (OpenAI, Slack, YouTube, Airbnb)

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...
5 Aug 2026 · 50 min

What your developers aren't telling you - Cat Hicks (Psychologist)

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...
29 Jul 2026 · 44 min

The new manifesto for product builders - Faith Forster (Chief Product Officer)

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...
22 Jul 2026 · 43 min

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

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...
15 Jul 2026 · 37 min

What product teams get wrong about trust- Simonetta Batteiger (Product Leadership Coach)

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...
8 Jul 2026 · 27 min

Why is product so hard? - Charity Ibhadon (Global Product Director, WPP)

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...
1 Jul 2026 · 43 min

Move fast and DON'T break things - Vonny Laing (UX Lead, Student Loans Company)

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...
24 Jun 2026 · 35 min

A deep dive into the state of product in 2026 — Emily Tate (VP Product)

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...
18 Jun 2026 · 28 min

How to build resilience in product - Lindsey Jayne (Product Advisor)

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...
10 Jun 2026 · 34 min

How to get the most out of product coaching - Lily Smith (Managing Director, BBC Maestro) and Randy Silver (Product and Leadership Coach)

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...
3 Jun 2026 · 43 min

How to lead when you don't fit in - Dave Martin (CPO, Fractional)

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...
27 May 2026 · 48 min

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

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...
20 May 2026 · 42 min

How PMs can win with open source - Dan Ciruli (Product Leader, Nutanix)

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...
13 May 2026 · 44 min

What I learned from unbuilding products and systems in the Public Sector - Ayushi Roy (Product Leader)

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...
6 May 2026 · 41 min

Everything you need to know about product messaging— Diane Wiredu (B2B, SaaS, Marketing, leader)

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...
29 Apr 2026 · 41 min

AI ate their search traffic. Here's what Springer Nature built instead — Prathik Roy

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...
22 Apr 2026 · 45 min

How to connect vision, strategy, and execution - Martin Eriksson (Author, The Decision Stack)

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...
15 Apr 2026 · 42 min

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

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 ...
8 Apr 2026 · 41 min

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

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 ...
1 Apr 2026 · 57 min

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

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 ...
25 Mar 2026 · 44 min

The state of product in Europe - Elias Lieberich (Product Strategy Coach)

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...
18 Mar 2026 · 41 min

How to fix broken systems - Kate Tarling (CEO, The Service Group)

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...

About The Product Experience: a Mind the Product podcast

The Product Experience features conversations with the product people of the world, focusing on real insights of how to improve your product practice. Part of the Mind the Product network, hosts Lily Smith (ProductTank organiser and Product Consultant) & Randy Silver (Head of Product and product management trainer) “go deep” with the best speakers from ProductTank meetups all over the globe, Mind the Product conferences, and the wider product community.

The Product Experience: a Mind the Product podcast is a English tech & science podcast from Mind the Product. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Mind the Product
Language: English
Category: Tech & Science
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 43 min
Latest episode: 6 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1447100407
Website: mindtheproduct.com/category/the-product-experience

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