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The Product Experience

The Product Experience

Mind the Product 386 Episodes Sep 16, 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

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
5 human signals AI won't replicate - Sarah McDevitt (Hubspot)
5 human signals AI won't replicate - Sarah McDevitt (Hubspot) Jul 22, 2026 2588 We're refreshing The Product Experience and want your input. Take our two-minute survey and help shape where the show goes next! Our HostsLily 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 startup
What product teams get wrong about trust- Simonetta Batteiger (Product Leadership Coach)
What product teams get wrong about trust- Simonetta Batteiger (Product Leadership Coach) Jul 15, 2026 2193 We're refreshing The Product Experience and want your input. Take our two-minute survey and help shape where the show goes next! Our HostsLily 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 startup
Why is product so hard? - Charity Ibhadon (Global Product Director, WPP)
Why is product so hard? - Charity Ibhadon (Global Product Director, WPP) Jul 8, 2026 1623 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 medi
Move fast and DON'T break things - Vonny Laing (UX Lead, Student Loans Company)
Move fast and DON'T break things - Vonny Laing (UX Lead, Student Loans Company) Jul 1, 2026 2550 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,

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