The Product Experience

Mind the Product
  • 4.7 (35)
  • BUSINESS
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

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.

  1. 2D AGO

    How to communicate the value of product work - Rich Mironov (CPO Coach)

    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.  Chapters 02:03 — 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 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 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.

    52 min

  2. MAR 4

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

    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. Chapters 00:00 — Intro: The feedback you didn't see coming at LinkedIn 02:00 — Laura's background: engineer, founder, consultant, PM 03:50 — Why a nonlinear career is more coherent than it looks 06:00 — Gaming as the most honest product environment 07:20 — Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, mods, and retention crisis 09:00 — How gaming metrics (DAU, retention) predicted big tech's future 12:10 — Data ends debates in tech; taste ends them in entertainment 13:05 — Netflix Animation: building a studio's product function from scratch 15:15 — Storyboards as prototypes, animatics as MVPs 19:40 — Tool consolidation: going from 400 to 130 tools across productions 22:05 — Build vs. buy decisions when the budget is a feature film 26:40 — What it takes to hire PMs for entertainment vs. general tech 28:20 — STAR interviews and evaluating stakeholder chops 29:20 — Why LinkedIn came next: curiosity about social network retention 31:50 — The weight of building for 1B+ users and LinkedIn's trust-first culture 35:50 — Profile, Messaging, Groups: LinkedIn's original value proposition 37:00 — Teaching advanced product management at UC Berkeley 38:10 — 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 environments 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 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.

    50 min

  3. FEB 25

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

    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 should care about business acumen 6:01 — Organisational causes of weak commercial context for PMs 8:10 — What business acumen means in practice 9:10 — Wake-up story: prioritisation shifted after asking the CEO about revenue drivers 11:05 — Misalignment: company goals vs team OKRs 12:13 — How to run the metrics one-pager and link product to business goals 14:37 — Strategy: where we are, where we’re going, how we’ll get there 15:03 — Encouraging ideas while setting business context 17:01 — Running collaborative bets before creating the roadmap 19:20 — Communicating value: turn “better onboarding” into business impact 22:08 — Avoiding over-attribution and internal attribution fights 23:05 — Example: marketing’s 12 touchpoints and joint contribution to acquisition 24:26 — Practising stakeholder storytelling; where LLMs help and don’t 29:17 — Presentation craft: fewer slides, start with numbers, end with actions 31:03 — Using LLMs for synthesis, not h 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 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.

    37 min

  4. FEB 18

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

    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. Chapters 03:30 Product as philosophy 04:41 Studying product vs learning in the field 07:25 The real job: understand users and their “why” 08:21 Why prioritisation frameworks often fail in practice 10:58 Decision-making without false precision 13:14 Goal-led roadmaps and narrative alignment 14:22 Metrics, ethics, and avoiding gamification traps 18:35 When PRDs help, and how to keep them lean 22:37 Prototyping, vibe coding, and where it falls apart 25:14 Communication, compromise, and working documents 27:36 Preventing overbuild and defining “good enough” 30:39 Handling “can’t you just…” from sales and marketing 33:28 What Alan wishes he knew five years ago 34:49 Explaining product management to non-product people 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 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.

    36 min

  5. FEB 16

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

    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. Chapters 06:03 Game development is cloud services plus filmmaking 07:08 The problem with silos in game studios 08:24 “Modern” games: live service, messy business models, shifting tastes 09:58 Defining a game: players decide if you got it right 11:41 Motivators of play and why they matter to product people 12:26 Disney Friends: the moment a playtest rewrote the design 17:19 Classic vs modern motivators: what technology changed 20:41 The research that challenged the “games are competition” assumption 22:36 Why game lessons translate to enterprise software (and where gamification goes wrong) 25:19 Pro-social design: trust, safety and communities at scale 28:33 Designing for companionship and shared experiences 34:43 Onboarding as growth strategy, not a “nice to have” 37:38 Journey mapping 100 levels: making invisible drop-off visible 39:25 On-demand learning beats one-and-done tutorials 41:58 Advice for people trying to break into games during layoffs 44:36 Turning a sixth anniversary outage into a UX win  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 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.

    51 min

  6. FEB 4

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

    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 What people think product leadership is 5:44 Creating clarity and explicit trade-offs 6:53 Why product organisations are not democracies 7:54 Input vs ownership in decision-making 8:24 Who is accountable for product decisions 9:50 Leadership, strategy, and prioritisation 10:02 How product leadership changes as companies scale 12:29 Why decision-making mechanics define product culture 13:27 Separating input from decisions 14:59 Committees vs accountability 16:16 Why alignment does not mean agreement 17:29 The three levels of product decisions 21:00 Diagnosing broken decision-making 22:08 Environment beats individual skill 23:19 What real prioritisation looks like 24:46 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 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.

    42 min

  7. JAN 28

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

    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 Premortems 01:39 Guest Introduction — Anu Jagga‑Narang 02:14 Career Journey into Product 05:03 What Is a Premortem? 07:04 Framing Failure and Success in Premortems 11:02 How to Conduct a Premortem 15:04 Voting and Risk Classification 17:00 Tigers, Paper Tigers, and Elephants 20:22 Assigning Ownership and Actions 21:28 When to Run a Premortem 23:40 Who Should Participate and Duration 25:14 Examples and Surprising Insights 28:43 Common Mistakes and Anti‑patterns 31:51 AI’s Impact on Premortems 34:13 Closing Remarks and Credits 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 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.

    35 min

  8. JAN 21

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

    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. Chapters 0:00 | 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 impact 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 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.

    34 min
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4.7
out of 5
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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Mind the Product
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2026
  • Episodes
    375
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Product Experience
  • Show Website
    The Product Experience

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