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The Product Experience

The Product Experience

Mind the Product 386 Episodes Oct 14, 2026

The Product Experience features conversations with product people worldwide, offering real insights to improve product practice. Hosts Lily Smith and Randy Silver interview top speakers from ProductTank meetups and Mind the Product conferences. Part of the Mind the Product network, the podcast covers a wide range of product management topics.

Episodes

How Google prototypes and ships at scale — Soufi Esmaeilzadeh (Google Search)
How Google prototypes and ships at scale — Soufi Esmaeilzadeh (Google Search) Oct 14, 2026 2606 Soufi Esmaeilzadeh is product director for AI experiences in Google Search, where she leads AI Overviews and AI Mode. In 15 years at Google, she has watched search move from ten blue links to multi-turn conversation. She joins Randy Silver to explain how her team prototypes and ships at Google’s scale, why she runs lean “SWAT team” pods, and how she balances speed against the quality bar users exp
Evals, Analytics, and How to escape the feature factory: Francois Lopitaux (SVP Product Management, ThoughtSpot)
Evals, Analytics, and How to escape the feature factory: Francois Lopitaux (SVP Product Management, ThoughtSpot) Oct 6, 2026 2598 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 explai
Four questions to ask before building AI into your product — Kendra Vant (Chief Product Officer, Tapi)
Four questions to ask before building AI into your product — Kendra Vant (Chief Product Officer, Tapi) Sep 30, 2026 2645 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 the
How to fix your product roadmap — Matt Feczko (Director of Product Ops, Ocado Technology)
How to fix your product roadmap — Matt Feczko (Director of Product Ops, Ocado Technology) Sep 23, 2026 2095 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 start
What is AI product management, really? Jonathan Evens (AI Product Lead, Google DeepMind)
What is AI product management, really? Jonathan Evens (AI Product Lead, Google DeepMind) Sep 16, 2026 2557 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 buil
What I learned from building, and exiting a startup — Kirsten Mann (Strategic Advisor)
What I learned from building, and exiting a startup — Kirsten Mann (Strategic Advisor) Sep 9, 2026 3096 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
How to position your product for a future nobody can predict - April Dunford (Author of Obviously Awesome)
How to position your product for a future nobody can predict - April Dunford (Author of Obviously Awesome) Sep 2, 2026 2270 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 expla
Four mistakes scaling teams make - Julia Barham (Author and Product Executive)
Four mistakes scaling teams make - Julia Barham (Author and Product Executive) Aug 26, 2026 2580 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 cas
How to lead a product team through AI adoption - Tiama Hanson-Drury (CPTO, Opus 2)
How to lead a product team through AI adoption - Tiama Hanson-Drury (CPTO, Opus 2) Aug 19, 2026 2343 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 scep
What OpenAI taught me to unlearn —  Blaine Billingsley (OpenAI, Slack, YouTube, Airbnb)
What OpenAI taught me to unlearn — Blaine Billingsley (OpenAI, Slack, YouTube, Airbnb) Aug 12, 2026 3353 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 engi
What your developers aren't telling you - Cat Hicks (Psychologist)
What your developers aren't telling you - Cat Hicks (Psychologist) Aug 5, 2026 2972 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 mor
The new manifesto for product builders - Faith Forster (Chief Product Officer)
The new manifesto for product builders - Faith Forster (Chief Product Officer) Jul 29, 2026 2659 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 gro

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