In this episode of the Product Experience Podcast, we speak with Kasia Chmielinski, co-founder of The Data Nutrition Project, who discusses their work on responsible AI, data quality, and the Data Nutrition Project. Kasia highlights the importance of balancing innovation with ethical considerations in product management, the challenges of working within large organizations like the UN, and the need for transparency in data usage.
 
Featured Links: Follow Kasia on LinkedIn | The Data Nutrition Project | 'What we learned at Pendomonium and #mtpcon 2024 Raleigh: Day 2' feature by Louron Pratt

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.

What does it take to build truly product-driven engineering teams? In this episode, Matt Watson — founder and CEO of Full Scale and author of Product Driven — joins Lily and Randy to challenge the longstanding silos between product and engineering. Drawing on 25+ years of experience and four tech ventures, Matt makes the case for why developers need more than just code to care about: they need context, ownership, and clarity.

From redefining “done” to the evolving role of AI in software teams, this conversation dives into how product leaders can foster a culture where engineers aren't just implementers, but co-creators of customer value.

Chapters
0:00 – Why “no feedback” is a warning sign, not success
1:46 – Matt’s journey: from developer to founder
2:58 – Thinking outside the code: how the book Product Driven started
4:50 – Why many engineers don’t think about the customer
5:57 – The rise of product managers and the walling off of engineers
6:56 – Redefining the role of PMs in cross-functional teams
9:01 – Metrics, measurement, and the illusion of progress
10:57 – Ownership as the root of productivity
13:04 – Code monkeys, culture, and killing creativity
14:55 – Communicating context: five minutes that save weeks
17:04 – AI and the changing definition of developer productivity
20:32 – External value vs internal tech debt
22:48 – The Product Driven model: Vision, Focus, Clarity, Shared Ownership, Courage
27:08 – Why courage is the starting point for change

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.

In this episode, Prerna Singh, CPTO at Avaaz, walks us through how AI is reshaping the way we prototype, learn and build digital products. Rather than replacing teams or skipping straight to production, she argues that AI shines when used as a “thought partner” to accelerate early‑stage experimentation.

Through her own journey building a community platform on weekends, she demonstrates how tools like ChatGPT, Lovable (and later Claude / Replet) and Figma AI enabled her to move from blank page to clickable prototype in hours — while retaining the human insight, iteration and context that underpin good product work.

The conversation reframes common assumptions about “fast‑AI = bypass human work,” and instead proposes a balanced adoption path: start in “sandbox mode,” learn and play — before graduating to “architect mode” where the real value to business begins.

Chapters
00:00 – Introduction & AI’s impact on product cycles
01:43 – Meet Prerna Singh: her background in product and community building
03:50 – The community problem: logistics over connection
05:11 – Turning to AI to solve her own problem
06:50 – What AI can’t do: user insight and human judgment
08:08 – From waterfall to short-cycle prototyping
10:54 – Using ChatGPT as a Socratic thought partner
13:07 – Working solo vs team: where AI fits
17:17 – From prompt to prototype: using Lovable
19:06 – Iterating with Figma AI and other tools
23:00 – Real feedback from real users
25:02 – Creating a feedback knowledge base with AI
26:16 – AI vs design sprints: same principles, new tools

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.

In this episode of The Product Experience, host Randy Silver speaks with Teresa Huang — Head of Product for Enablement at global health‑insurer Bupa — about the often‑overlooked world of platform product management. They explore why building internal platforms is fundamentally different and often more challenging than building user‑facing products, how to measure the value of platform work, and practical strategies for gaining stakeholder alignment, driving platform adoption and demonstrating business impact.

Chapters
0:00 – Why “efficiency” alone no longer cuts it — measuring platform impact in business terms
1:02 – Teresa’s background: from business analyst to head of product in health insurance
6:20 – What we mean by “platform product management” — internal tools vs marketplace vs public‑API platforms
7:44 – Why you need to “hop two steps”: address developer needs and end-customer value
10:24 – Types of platforms: internal APIs, marketplace ecosystems, public‑facing platforms (e.g. like Shopify)
10:55 – Reframing platform work: building business cases instead of chasing “efficiency” metrics
13:16 – Linking platform initiatives to core business goals and joint OKRs
15:47 – The importance of visualisation — using prototypes and role‑plays to communicate platform value
20:57 – Internal showcases: keeping stakeholders engaged with real‑world scenarios
23:28 – Success metrics for platforms: adoption, usage, reliability, ecosystem growth
26:00 – Retiring legacy services: deciding when low-use tools should be decommissioned
28:55 – From cost centre to enabler: shifting the narrative to show value creation

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.

In this episode of The Product Experience, host Randy Silver speaks with Teresa Huang — Head of Product for Enablement at global health‑insurer Bupa — about the often‑overlooked world of platform product management. They explore why building internal platforms is fundamentally different and often more challenging than building user‑facing products, how to measure the value of platform work, and practical strategies for gaining stakeholder alignment, driving platform adoption and demonstrating business impact.

Chapters

0:00 – Why “efficiency” alone no longer cuts it — measuring platform impact in business terms
1:02 – Teresa’s background: from business analyst to head of product in health insurance
6:20 – What we mean by “platform product management” — internal tools vs marketplace vs public‑API platforms
7:44 – Why you need to “hop two steps”: address developer needs and end-customer value
10:24 – Types of platforms: internal APIs, marketplace ecosystems, public‑facing platforms (e.g. like Shopify)
10:55 – Reframing platform work: building business cases instead of chasing “efficiency” metrics
13:16 – Linking platform initiatives to core business goals and joint OKRs
15:47 – The importance of visualisation — using prototypes and role‑plays to communicate platform value
20:57 – Internal showcases: keeping stakeholders engaged with real‑world scenarios
23:28 – Success metrics for platforms: adoption, usage, reliability, ecosystem growth
26:00 – Retiring legacy services: deciding when low-use tools should be decommissioned
28:55 – From cost centre to enabler: shifting the narrative to show value creation

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.

In this episode of The Product Experience, host Randy Silver sits down with product veteran John Cutler to explore why creating great products remains one of the hardest things organisations do. They dive into why so many companies adopt off‑the‑shelf models (“Spotify”, “SAFe”, etc) and still struggle, and how the secret often lies not in what you build but how you build it—specifically the game you design for how you work.

Chapters
00:00 — The stigma around “how you work”
00:54 — Introducing John Cutler (again)
01:25 — What John’s building at Dotwork
02:46 — From fun to formal: doing discovery at scale
04:04 — Why process became a bad word
05:10 — The “cavalier PM” mindset
06:28 — Empowered teams vs. harsh realities
08:00 — What great pockets of practice have in common
09:03 — Managing up vs. doing the right thing
10:24 — Playing the game vs. designing the game
11:20 — What makes a great internal game
12:33 — Defining success: thriving, surviving, progressing
13:46 — Environmental design: why leaders hesitate
15:10 — Making intentional design less intimidating
16:42 — Tools, rituals, and the power of checkpoints
18:23 — The behaviour design playbook
20:41 — Removing blockers: access, repetition, reflection
22:12 — Replayability and t

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.

In this episode, Nina Olding, Staff Product Manager at Weights & Biases and formerly at Google DeepMind, working on trust and compliance for AI, joins Randy to explore the UX challenges of AI‑driven features. As AI becomes increasingly woven into digital products, the traditional UX cues and trust‑signals that users rely on are changing. Nina introduces her framework of the three “A’s” for AI UX: Awareness, Agency, and Assurance, and explains how product teams can build this into their AI‑enabled products without launching a massive transformation programme.

Key Takeaways
— As AI features proliferate, the UX challenge is less about the technology and more about how users perceive, understand and trust the interactions.
— Trust is based on three foundational dimensions for AI‑enabled products: Awareness, Agency, Assurance.
— Awareness: Make it clear when AI is involved (and when it isn’t). Invisible AI = risk of misunderstanding. Magical AI without context = disorientation.
— Agency: Give users control, or at least the option to opt‑out, define boundaries, choose defaults vs advanced settings.
— Assurance: Because AI can be non‑deterministic, you must design for confidence—indicators of reliability, transparency about limitations, ability to question or override outputs.

Chapters
00:00 – Intro: Why AI products are failing on trust
00:47 – Nina Old’s journey from Google DeepMind to Weights & Biases
03:20 – The UX of AI: It's not just a chat window
04:08 – Introducing the Three A’s framework: Awareness, Agency, Assurance
08:30 – Designing for Awareness: Visibility and user signals
14:40 – Agency: Giving users control and escape hatches
21:30 – Assurance: Transparency, confidence indicators, and humility
28:05 – Three key questions to assess AI UX
30:50 – The product case for trust: Compliance, loyalty, and retention
33:00 – Final thoughts: Building the trust muscle

Featured Links: Follow Nina on LinkedIn | Weights & Biases | Check out Nina's 'The hidden UX of AI' slides from Industry Conference Cleveland 2025

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.

In this episode of The Product Experience, Lily Smith speaks with Vidya Dinamani, product veteran, coach, and Co-founder of Product Rebels, about how to tell if your team is truly product-led or just paying lip service. With over a decade of experience coaching hundreds of teams, Vidya shares her insights into the critical elements of product maturity, the most overlooked barriers to effective product work, and how Product Rebels' diagnostic framework is helping companies move from chaos to clarity. 

Chapters
00:00 – The customer conversation gap
01:28 – Meet Vidya Dinamani and Product Rebels
03:35 – Why they built a diagnostic, not an assessment
04:45 – Mindsets, competencies, and the missing piece: resources
06:28 – AI readiness: the new fourth pillar
07:40 – What it really means to be product-led
09:59 – How teams are using the diagnostic
13:10 – Breaking down the four pillars
16:01 – Why access to customers remains a key obstacle
17:38 – Patterns, or lack thereof, in product maturity
20:26 – AI readiness in context
23:59 – A case study: product maturity at scale
27:52 – Final thoughts on assessment vs naming

What we learned from Vidya 

• Most product teams lack customer access: 70–80% of PMs Product Rebels encounter say they’ve never spoken to a customer.
• Being product-led requires more than intent: It demands mindset, core competencies, supportive resources—and now AI readiness.
• Diagnostic, not assessment: Their tool isn’t about performance reviews; it’s a heat map that reveals where to begin your transformation.
• AI is not a bolt-on: AI readiness is most effective when integrated into the broader product maturity conversation, not treated as a silo.
• Start with one thing: Rather than trying to become product-led across the board, identify a single focus area and build momentum from there.
• Internal PMs need customer framing too: Even teams building internal platforms need customer advocacy and insight.

Featured Links: Follow Vidya on LinkedIn | Product Rebels 

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.

Building the right thing is hard. Building the wrong thing is easy and costly. In this episode, Jason Sparks, Principal Product Manager at ReUp Education, dives deep into the discipline of continuous validation inside enterprise environments. From managing stakeholder pressure to proactively engaging customers in discovery, Jason shares battle-tested approaches for avoiding the classic trap of solution-first thinking.

Chapters

• 0:00 – The risk of unvalidated assumptions
• 1:02 – Meet Jason Sparks and his mission at ReUp
• 3:02 – From college dropout to product leader
• 5:19 – Product-market fit inside the enterprise
• 6:03 – Why most ideas don’t need building
• 8:10 – Misalignment: wrong product, wrong market
• 10:05 – Executive interference and assumption management
• 12:33 – Validation is not a one-off
• 14:44 – Continuous discovery in practice
• 15:38 – How to validate enterprise product ideas
• 17:02 – Story decks, user interviews and field testing
• 19:11 – Grading feedback and customer fit
• 21:11 – The danger of over-friendly users
• 23:08 – The power of early champions
• 25:21 – Preparing for and running discovery sessions
• 27:35 – Value testing and competitor awareness
• 29:08 – When to walk away from the wrong customer
• 31:17 – What happens after the meetings
• 33:30 – The role of AI in user research
• 35:46 – What Jason would do differently today

What you'll learn from Jason

— Validation should be continuous: One round of user feedback isn’t enough. Real product-market fit evolves through repeated conversations and iteration.

— Assumptions must be challenged: Build a culture where being proven wrong is celebrated, not feared.

— Don’t let leadership derail discovery: Product managers must set boundaries and bring clarity on the problem space before execution begins.

— Grading users is as critical as grading feedback: Identify the right customers to listen to—being nice isn’t the same as being the right fit.

— Use discovery decks to guide conversations: Jason uses bold assumptions, interactive sessions, and immediate iteration to refine ideas quickly.

— Tech accelerates, but doesn’t replace, human insight: AI tools for sentiment and semantic analysis are powerful but should supplement—not substitute—real human interaction.

Featured Links: Follow Jason on LinkedIn |

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.

Why do great product ideas fail to gain traction? According to Elena Luna, it’s rarely about the strategy and more often about the storytelling. In this episode of The Product Experience, Elena Luneva, a seasoned CPO, GM, and Maven instructor, joins Randy Silver live from INDUSTRY 2025 to explore how product leaders can better communicate the why behind their product decisions.

What we learned from Elena
— Speaking 'User' isn’t enough – Executives care about business impact, not just engagement metrics.
— Translate features to financials – Frame product initiatives in terms of ARPU, opex savings, or revenue impact.
— Use storytelling with data – Combine real user insights with projections to make your case.
— Seasonality matters – Product testing should account for time-of-year and market behaviour.
— Align go-to-market early – Synchronising product and sales is key to driving measurable outcomes.
— Ask better questions – Start with: What is it? Why does it matter? How much will it cost? When will we get it?

Chapters
2:45 – The Ceiling for Great PMs
4:09 – Speaking Executive
5:22 – Case Study: Nextdoor Maps
9:52 – Translating Engagement to Revenue
10:49 – Embedding Finance into Product Thinking
12:43 – Pivoting During COVID
14:36 – Business Fluency at All Levels
16:00 – Building Context Across Teams
18:26 – The Four Questions
20:06 – Thinking in Horizons
22:43 – Shifting Accountability
26:23 – CPMO vs. CPTO
27:43 – Common Mistakes
29:42 – Seasonality & Cannibalisation
32:29 – Practical First Steps
34:21 – Credits & Outro

Featured Links: Follow Elena on LinkedIn | Elena's Substack | Industry Conference Cleveland 2025 recap at Mind The Product | Sign up to Elena's coaching course 

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.