Home Podcasts The Product Experience
The Product Experience

The Product Experience

Mind the Product 386 Episodes Jul 1, 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

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,
A deep dive into the state of product in 2026 — Emily Tate (VP Product) Jun 24, 2026 2098 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
How to build resilience in product - Lindsey Jayne (Product Advisor) Jun 18, 2026 1688 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 storie
How to get the most out of product coaching - Lily Smith (Managing Director, BBC Maestro) and Randy Silver (Product and Leadership Coach) Jun 10, 2026 2035 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 startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping
How to lead when you don't fit in - Dave Martin (CPO, Fractional) Jun 3, 2026 2594 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 tec
Why you're not falling behind on AI - Barry O'Reilly (Author, Artificial Organizations) May 27, 2026 2902 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 advis
How PMs can win with open source - Dan Ciruli (Product Leader, Nutanix) May 20, 2026 2505 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 cl
What I learned from unbuilding products and systems in the Public Sector - Ayushi Roy (Product Leader) May 13, 2026 2641 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 congr
Everything you need to know about product messaging— Diane Wiredu (B2B, SaaS, Marketing, leader) May 6, 2026 2468 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 HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to ot
AI ate their search traffic. Here's what Springer Nature built instead — Prathik Roy Apr 29, 2026 2440 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
How to connect vision, strategy, and execution - Martin Eriksson (Author, The Decision Stack) Apr 22, 2026 2715 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 compa
The document that can replace PRDs — Rags Vadali (Founder & CEO, floto.ai) Apr 15, 2026 2545 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 prod

Recommended