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 the day-to-day workflow of product teams. In this conversation with Randy Silver, he talks about what design actually means when your interface is a text box, why volume beats perfection in an age of infinite iteration, and why the fundamentals of good product thinking are more durable than the tools used to apply them.

Key takeaways

— The designer's job at an AI company has shifted from pixels to outputs. Deciding what "good" looks like, building the criteria to evaluate it, and heuristically assessing results is now a core part of the role — one that didn't exist in the same form at Gmail or Slack.
— LLMs don't replace structured creativity techniques; they scale them. The crazy eights exercise squeezes eight ideas from a room of people in eight minutes. A well-directed ChatGPT session can return 80 in the same window, alone, while you're at lunch.
— Volume beats perfection. The best way to make a pot isn't to try to make the best pot — it's to make a thousand pots. That logic now applies directly to prototyping: generate at scale, stay unattached, and find the nugget in the noise.
— Evals are closer to synthetic user research than quality assurance. The hardest part isn't building the rubric — it's correctly anticipating what people will actually try to do. Show it to one more person and your assumptions will immediately break.
— The second 80% problem hasn't gone away. Getting to a working prototype is dramatically faster; getting that prototype to production is still gruelling — and becomes harder still when platform direction shifts mid-sprint.
— Small teams with AI assistance need to protect the rituals that keep them aligned. When two people can each produce a week's worth of work in an afternoon, parallel drift becomes the real collaboration risk.
— Role boundaries are dissolving, but specialisations still matter. The question is less "what is your title" and more "what does the band need right now, and can you play that part?"
— Experience brings judgment; freshness brings juice. The best work often comes from junior designers unconstrained by years of accumulated assumptions — and both things need to be in the room.

Chapters 

• (00:00) Introduction
• (01:14) Blaine's background: from music composition to product design 
• (02:32) What design means at OpenAI 
• (04:21) The ChatGPT product design plugin 
• (06:12) Deciding what to build: the early exploration 
• (10:05) Structured creativity and LLM-powered ideation 
• (13:37) Volume over perfection: the thousand pots approach 
• (16:13) Designing as a two-person team 
• (20:29) What is the job now? 
• (23:33) Evals as synthetic user research 
• (27:08) Testing at scale when you can't know your users 
• (30:15) How they actually did the research 
• (33:01) The second 80%: from prototype to production 
• (35:06) Staying aligned without roadmaps 
• (38:19) Demo: the product design plugin 
• (44:52) When a prototype isn't ready to ship 
• (48:26) Design sprints, reimagined 
• (49:27) Advice for joining an AI-first product team 
• (52:17) The jazz analogy: experience, freshness and your role in the band 

Featured Links

• ChatGPT for Work: https://openai.com/chatgpt 
• Codex: https://openai.com/codex 
• Figma: https://figma.com 
• FigJam: https://www.figma.com/figjam 
• Linear: https://linear.app

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.

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, brings that evidence to bear on the question her industry keeps asking: why do smart people in smart organisations so often struggle to work well together? We talk about the hidden costs of treating developers as interchangeable units, what large-scale cycle time data reveals about individual performance, and how product managers can build the conditions for teams to actually thrive.

Key takeaways

1. The "brains and jars" model — treating developers as interchangeable, isolated computing units — does not just feel demeaning; it actively undermines the collaborative, social work that makes software teams effective, and is linked to burnout, self-censorship, and a breakdown of trust.
2. Cycle time data from 216 companies and over 11,000 developers shows that individual performance fluctuates dramatically week to week — it is not a stable personal trait — which means slow periods are usually an environmental problem, not a personal one.
3. Over-production pressure (the constant pull towards short-term delivery) has measurable cascading effects: developers stop mentoring, stop surfacing problems to managers, and stop investing in long-term code quality. It can be measured and, with committed leadership, changed within weeks.
4. AI is producing genuine identity threats, not just productivity disruption. Teams that lower the "threat temperature" — framing change as a shared technical challenge and affirming that new skills can always be learnt — unlock significantly more adaptive and curious behaviour.
5. Metacognitive scaffolding — building structured strategies for thinking about your own thinking, not just raw output — is more trainable than cognitive capacity and is almost entirely absent from how agentic coding environments are currently designed.
6. Superordinate goals (shared outcomes that transcend individual preferences) allow diverse teams, including those who prefer deep solo work, to collaborate productively without demanding that everyone care about the product in the same way.

Chapters

• (00:00) Opening 
• (01:06) Cat's background and the book 
• (04:40) Defining a software team 
• (07:02) Building the Developer Success Lab 
• (10:26) The brains and jars model 
• (13:14) What the model costs teams 
• (17:54) Why communicating value is so hard 
• (19:04) What change looks like in practice 
• (23:01) Code review anxiety and cycle time research 
• (27:55) AI's effect on developer identity 
• (31:57) Agentic coding and cognitive fatigue 
• (35:46) Threat, play, and psychological safety 
• (38:19) Working across disciplines 
• (43:04) What product managers can do 
• (48:00) Wrap-up

Referenced

• The Psychology of Software Teams by Dr Cat Hicks
• The Programmer's Brain by Felienne Hermans
• The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg
• Developer Success Lab (Pluralsight)
• DORA project
• Catharsis — Dr Cat Hicks's consultancy
• Fight for the Human — Dr Cat Hicks's newsletter
• Dr Cat Hicks
• Learning Opportunities Claude skill — by Dr Cat Hicks
• Deliberate practice and chess improvement study (44,000 Chess.com players)

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.

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-disciplinary set of values and principles for building great products in the age of AI, developed with 45 contributors from across product, engineering, design, and business leadership.

We discuss:

1. The manifesto emerged from 96 conversations with product leaders whose grasp of AI ranged from fully automated pipelines to treating it as a faster way to write PRDs — a gap that revealed an industry in urgent need of a shared reference point.
2. Four values anchor the manifesto: purpose over possibility, value created over effort spent, learning loops over launch plans, and human accountability over full automation.
3. "Maker" was chosen over "builder" to signal that designers, engineers, salespeople, customer support staff, and founders all share equal ownership of the creation process — regardless of job title.
4. Feature parity is no longer a defensible moat: when any competitor can replicate a capability within days, durable advantage must come from data, relationships, distribution, and business model.
5. Product market fit can no longer be treated as a static milestone — in a market where products, competitors, and customer expectations shift simultaneously, fit must become a continuous, living part of decision-making.
6. "Done" now means adopted, not shipped. AI removes every excuse for clunky, one-size-fits-all experiences, and teams that still equate production deployment with completion are measuring the wrong thing.
7. Making context explicit — codifying strategy in a form that agents and humans can both act on daily — is the principle teams consistently identify as their most urgent, immediate priority.

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction 
• 01:12 Faith's background 
• 02:28 Origins of the Makers Manifesto 
• 06:18 Makers Manifesto vs the Agile Manifesto 
• 07:23 Why "maker" not "builder" 
• 11:42 Four values and 16 principles 
• 15:01 Purpose over possibility 
• 19:10 Learning loops over launch plans 
• 22:36 Who gets to be a maker 
• 28:55 Durable advantage in the AI era 
• 33:22 Staying close to customers 
• 36:04 What's next for the manifesto 
• 43:59 Wrap-up

Referenced

• Makers Manifesto — https://makersmanifesto.org
• discovery.com — Faith's AI-native product decision platform

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.

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.

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.

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 made it harder, not easier, to feel like you're doing the job well — regardless of seniority
— How the physical symptoms of burnout can masquerade as markers of success, and why high-achieving women in particular are vulnerable to that misreading
— What it actually takes to recover: stepping away, finding what your body needs outside of work, and stopping short of making your job your entire identity
— Why being genuinely enjoyable to work with is a more durable career advantage than any certification or methodology
— How the Eisenhower matrix — do, defer, delegate, delete — can be a practical daily tool for protecting energy, not just a poster on a wall
— The case for "happy high status": remaining calm and unflappable under pressure as a learnable leadership behaviour, not a personality trait
— Why commercial curiosity — understanding what moves the business and staying interested in the world — will matter more for long-term product careers than AI certificates

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:29 Charity's background
4:00 Why product feels harder than ever
6:34 Why fun at work matters
8:45 Recognising burnout
10:25 When burnout feels like success
12:13 Finding your way back
16:18 Fun as a strategic advantage
18:00 Staying calm under pressure
22:26 The "CEO of the product" myth
22:41 Mindset for a long career in product
24:45 Building resilience
26:35 Wrap-up

Referenced
Eisenhower matrix | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priorit...
Charity's keynote at #mtpcon London |    • Product is Hard. It should still be fun: C...  

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.

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 majority inward produces invisible failures, how flipping to an underserved-first model creates a halo effect for all users, and why government service assessments make the happy-path approach structurally untenable. Vonny shares how a single day of guerrilla research at a further education college surfaced a critical gap between student loan payments and universal credit eligibility that years of data had never revealed — and why synthetic users can never replicate that. We also get into her "eat your greens" principle for designing across a user's whole life; the case for disaster thinking over happy-path optimism; how stories and verbatims move executives more reliably than dashboards; and why designers who learn to speak business become a secret weapon in any organisation.

Chapters:
(00:53) Welcome and introductions
(01:23) Vonny background
(02:10) Moving fast in the civil service
(04:02) The UK government digital community
(05:05) The pyramid model
(07:03) Underserved versus edge case users
(08:09) Designing at population scale
(09:43) Service assessments and design accountability
(11:01) Discovery research methodology
(13:25) Finding users invisible in the data
(16:22) Bridging gaps you cannot fix
(18:42) Eat your greens: needs versus wants
(20:07) Designing for users over time
(21:04) Worst-case scenario thinking
(22:11) Mining complaint logs and prioritising
(25:47) Why synthetic users fall short
(28:12) Where automated testing has a role
(29:19) Leave the building: guerrilla research
(33:03) Communicating research through storytelling
(36:29) Why Vonnie did an MBA
(39:03) Design's ceiling in organisations
(42:04) Wrap-up

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.

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 frenzy, and why remote work is draining the fun out of product teams.

Chapters

• 0:00 — Intro
• 1:00 — The state of AI in product: still an inflection point
• 3:18 — AI is a technology, not a moat
• 4:57 — Keeping the humanity in product work
• 6:13 — Advice for PMs new to the industry
• 8:38 — Why conferences need both practical and inspirational talks
• 10:24 — How to start speaking: find your local ProductTank
• 13:46 — You don't need a novel idea to give a great talk
• 16:01 — Charity Ibhadon's talk: product is hard, but it should be fun
• 16:19 — Remote work and the slow erosion of joy at work
• 19:15 — Innovating inside heritage organisations
• 21:39 — Stop trying to educate stakeholders about product
• 24:06 — April Dunford on positioning: what AI changes, and what it doesn't
• 27:00 — The SaaS-pocalypse myth
• 28:47 — Predictions: 12–18 more months of heavy AI talk
• 30:59 — Filtering signal from noise: where Emily reads
• 31:40 — Eric Ries' Incorruptible and building companies that resist corruption

Key takeaways

• If your only moat is AI, you don't have a moat. AI is a capability, not a product. The question is how you're using it to serve customers better than you could before — not whether you're using it at all.
• Building is no longer the bottleneck — deciding what to build is. That shift makes strong product and design thinking more important, not less.
• Stop trying to teach stakeholders about product. Drop the methodology, use their language, show them something tangible, and bring them along in ways that make sense to them — not to you.
• SaaS has a defensible edge. Products built on experience across hundreds of customers carry knowledge that a single company building its own solution can't replicate. That's a positioning story worth telling.
• Positioning fundamentals haven't changed. Sprinkling AI on your messaging doesn't sharpen it. Outside of tech, leading with AI can actively damage trust.
• You don't need a novel idea to give a great talk. Your version of a familiar concept might be the one that finally makes it click for someone. Start at a local ProductTank.
• Don't try to be someone else on stage. Find your style by doing it. Authenticity beats borrowed charisma.
• Remote work is eroding team joy in ways we're not measuring. The informal moments that build relationships and make work fun don't happen on Slack or in back-to-back video calls — and the resulting friction is real.

Featured links  

• Incorruptible by Eric Ries — https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/460881/incorruptible-by-ries-eric/9780241692028
• The Decision Stack by Martin Eriksson — thedecisionstack.com
• Christian Idiodi — Silicon Valley Product Group
• April Dunford — aprildunford.com
• Find your local ProductTank — producttank.com
• Mind the Product — mindtheproduct.com

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.

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 government laptop to product management
02:48 — Why product managers burn out: accountability without authority
05:34 — Influencing stakeholders using discovery skills
07:19 — What leaders can do to clear the way for their product teams
08:44 — Stakeholder mapping: the influence and interest framework
09:41 — Recognising burnout signals in your team at scale
11:16 — Balancing passion and sustainability: when enthusiasm becomes a pattern
14:16 — When to transition from individual contributor to product leader
16:24 — Product reviews and cross-team knowledge sharing
18:42 — How to communicate effectively with senior stakeholders
20:40 — Career-defining advice: you don't have to die on every hill
21:43 — Half your job is landing the product, not just building it
22:25 — The most common mistake junior product managers make
24:05 — How to tell your story after a difficult or toxic company exit

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.

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.