Kate Tarling — consultant, trainer, and author of The Service Organization — joins Lily and Randy to discuss what it takes to deliver great services inside large, complex organizations. The conversation covers the distinction between products and services, why transformation so often stalls, how to make the business case for change using existing investment, and how product people can contribute to, and benefit from, a more service-oriented way of working.

Chapters

• 00:01:30 — Introduction and Kate's background
• 00:04:00 — Defining services vs. products
• 00:07:00 — Product organizations vs. service organizations
• 00:09:00 — Why service delivery is hard
• 00:11:30 — Transformation in practice: there is no magic process
• 00:13:30 — Starting with one area and cutting across silos
• 00:15:30 — Common mistakes organizations make
• 00:19:30 — Measuring progress and making the business case
• 00:22:30 — Redirecting existing investment: a UK government example
• 00:25:00 — Triage functions and portfolio management
• 00:26:00 — How product people can contribute in service organizations
• 00:30:30 — Kate's 12 principles
• 00:34:00 — Summary
• 00:37:00 — Examples of good service organizations

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.

Rich Mironov has spent decades watching product teams lose the room because they were speaking the wrong language. In his new book Money Stories, he makes the case that product managers need a second vocabulary: one built around revenue, retention, and return. 

In this conversation, he walks through the core framework, why order-of-magnitude estimates beat false precision, how to build a roadmap that holds its ground against sales pressure, and what the AI moment has in common with the early days of mobile. 

Chapters

• 02:03 — What are money stories, and why do executives need them?
• 03:59 — How accurate do you actually need to be? The case for order-of-magnitude thinking
• 05:52 — Using money stories as a sorting mechanism — and how to handle the "close this deal now" pressure
• 10:54 — Tagging roadmaps with revenue ranges and the "or principle"
• 15:58 — Does every PM need this, or just senior leaders?
• 21:46 — The two flavors of ROI: earning your keep vs. feature-level returns
• 26:57 — Why feature-level ROI almost never works — and why product leaders need to push back
• 30:33 — The story archetypes: upsell stories explained
• 38:02 — The retention/churn story archetype
• 41:32 — Why product people get this wrong: fear of commitment and the need to be understood
• 44:52 — How AI changes (and doesn't change) the money story framework
• 48:58 — How to build financial literacy as a product manager

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.

Laura Teclemariam has had one of the most varied careers in product — from mobile gaming economies at EA to building Netflix's animation studio from the ground up, to owning LinkedIn's core identity products. In this episode, she joins Lily and Randy to trace the through-line of her "jungle gym" path, unpack what gaming taught her about retention, why entertainment sharpens your product instincts in ways big tech can't, and how she's now teaching the next generation of PMs at UC Berkeley — with AI at the centre of everything.

Chapters
00:00 — Intro: The feedback you didn't see coming at LinkedIn
02:00 — Laura's background: engineer, founder, consultant, PM
03:50 — Why a nonlinear career is more coherent than it looks
06:00 — Gaming as the most honest product environment
07:20 — Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, mods, and retention crisis
09:00 — How gaming metrics (DAU, retention) predicted big tech's future
12:10 — Data ends debates in tech; taste ends them in entertainment
13:05 — Netflix Animation: building a studio's product function from scratch
15:15 — Storyboards as prototypes, animatics as MVPs
19:40 — Tool consolidation: going from 400 to 130 tools across productions
22:05 — Build vs. buy decisions when the budget is a feature film
26:40 — What it takes to hire PMs for entertainment vs. general tech
28:20 — STAR interviews and evaluating stakeholder chops
29:20 — Why LinkedIn came next: curiosity about social network retention
31:50 — The weight of building for 1B+ users and LinkedIn's trust-first culture
35:50 — Profile, Messaging, Groups: LinkedIn's original value proposition
37:00 — Teaching advanced product management at UC Berkeley
38:10 — The course thesis: AI for everything, and the "great convergence"
42:00 — Does the PM/design/engineering triad collapse with AI?
45:30 — What Laura's students taught her about curiosity and safe-to-fail environments

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.

Corinna Stukan, Product Leader and Founder of Fintech marketplace Bizzy, lays out practical advice for connecting your product roadmap to business goals. She explains how a metrics one-pager aligns day-to-day product decisions with company goals, why understanding whether your business is in growth, acquisition or cost-control mode should shape every prioritisation call, and how to frame initiatives so stakeholders see commercial impact, not just better UX.

Chapters
4:00 — Why product people should care about business acumen
6:01 — Organisational causes of weak commercial context for PMs
8:10 — What business acumen means in practice
9:10 — Wake-up story: prioritisation shifted after asking the CEO about revenue drivers
11:05 — Misalignment: company goals vs team OKRs
12:13 — How to run the metrics one-pager and link product to business goals
14:37 — Strategy: where we are, where we’re going, how we’ll get there
15:03 — Encouraging ideas while setting business context
17:01 — Running collaborative bets before creating the roadmap
19:20 — Communicating value: turn “better onboarding” into business impact
22:08 — Avoiding over-attribution and internal attribution fights
23:05 — Example: marketing’s 12 touchpoints and joint contribution to acquisition
24:26 — Practising stakeholder storytelling; where LLMs help and don’t
29:17 — Presentation craft: fewer slides, start with numbers, end with actions
31:03 — Using LLMs for synthesis, not hu

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.

Alan Byrne, Product Leader for Mozilla’s Firefox extensions ecosystem, argues that the best product work is less doctrine and more judgement. In conversation with LRandy Silver, he breaks down why prioritisation frameworks like RICE and MoSCoW often masquerade as science while quietly embedding subjectivity—and why he prefers writing clear “what and why” statements over chasing false precision.

From his experience at QuickBooks and Twitter, Alan explores when PRDs are genuinely valuable (complex systems, high risk, trust and safety concerns) and how to keep them lean enough to stay useful. The discussion also digs into the tension between moving a metric and doing right by users, the dangers of gamifying growth, and how product managers can translate customer problems into narratives that align engineers, executives, and sales.

Chapters
03:30 Product as philosophy
04:41 Studying product vs learning in the field
07:25 The real job: understand users and their “why”
08:21 Why prioritisation frameworks often fail in practice
10:58 Decision-making without false precision
13:14 Goal-led roadmaps and narrative alignment
14:22 Metrics, ethics, and avoiding gamification traps
18:35 When PRDs help, and how to keep them lean
22:37 Prototyping, vibe coding, and where it falls apart
25:14 Communication, compromise, and working documents
27:36 Preventing overbuild and defining “good enough”
30:39 Handling “can’t you just…” from sales and marketing
33:28 What Alan wishes he knew five years ago
34:49 Explaining product management to non-product people

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.

Cheryl Platz, Cheryl Platz, former UX Director for Riot Games, Scopely and Author of "The Game Development Strategy Guide," returns to The Product Experience to explore how video game design principles can transform product development. 

From her time at Riot Games and Marvel Strike Force to teaching at Carnegie Mellon, Cheryl shares hard-won lessons about player motivation, onboarding, and building products that thrive. Discover why competition is no longer the primary driver of modern gaming, how a children's game taught her about gendered design assumptions, and how she turned a catastrophic server outage into a UX win that made Reddit happy.

Chapters
06:03 Game development is cloud services plus filmmaking
07:08 The problem with silos in game studios
08:24 “Modern” games: live service, messy business models, shifting tastes
09:58 Defining a game: players decide if you got it right
11:41 Motivators of play and why they matter to product people
12:26 Disney Friends: the moment a playtest rewrote the design
17:19 Classic vs modern motivators: what technology changed
20:41 The research that challenged the “games are competition” assumption
22:36 Why game lessons translate to enterprise software (and where gamification goes wrong)
25:19 Pro-social design: trust, safety and communities at scale
28:33 Designing for companionship and shared experiences
34:43 Onboarding as growth strategy, not a “nice to have”
37:38 Journey mapping 100 levels: making invisible drop-off visible
39:25 On-demand learning beats one-and-done tutorials
41:58 Advice for people trying to break into games during layoffs
44:36 Turning a sixth anniversary outage into a UX win 

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 alignment really mean in product teams, and why does consensus often slow everything down?

In this episode of The Product Experience, Lily Smith and Randy Silver are joined by Blagoja Golubovski (VP of Product, formerly at Usercentrics) to unpack one of the most persistent myths in product leadership: that good product organisations are democracies.

Chapters
0:00 Product leadership is not about consensus
1:21 Introduction to Blagoja
2:48 From engineering to product leadership
4:47 What people think product leadership is
5:44 Creating clarity and explicit trade-offs
6:53 Why product organisations are not democracies
7:54 Input vs ownership in decision-making
8:24 Who is accountable for product decisions
9:50 Leadership, strategy, and prioritisation
10:02 How product leadership changes as companies scale
12:29 Why decision-making mechanics define product culture
13:27 Separating input from decisions
14:59 Committees vs accountability
16:16 Why alignment does not mean agreement
17:29 The three levels of product decisions
21:00 Diagnosing broken decision-making
22:08 Environment beats individual skill
23:19 What real prioritisation looks like
24:46

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, Lily Smith and Randy Silver host Anu Jagga‑Narang, a product evangelist at AT&T, to explore premortems — a powerful technique for anticipating product failure before launch. Anu explains how premortems use prospective hindsight to uncover risks early, surface assumptions teams are reluctant to voice, and improve decision quality.

The conversation covers practical steps for running premortems, risk classification using tigers, paper tigers and elephants, common pitfalls, and when to revisit the exercise as products evolve. They also examine how emerging AI capabilities influence product risk management — increasing the need for thoughtful planning rather than replacing human insight. This discussion offers product leaders a framework to strengthen strategic thinking, foster psychological safety and equip teams to build with confidence and clarity.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Premortems
01:39 Guest Introduction — Anu Jagga‑Narang
02:14 Career Journey into Product
05:03 What Is a Premortem?
07:04 Framing Failure and Success in Premortems
11:02 How to Conduct a Premortem
15:04 Voting and Risk Classification
17:00 Tigers, Paper Tigers, and Elephants
20:22 Assigning Ownership and Actions
21:28 When to Run a Premortem
23:40 Who Should Participate and Duration
25:14 Examples and Surprising Insights
28:43 Common Mistakes and Anti‑patterns
31:51 AI’s Impact on Premortems
34:13 Closing Remarks and Credits

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 talks with Cristina Bustos, Product Manager and team lead at Swiss AviationSoftware, about her experience launching a native mobile application in one of the most regulated and high‑stakes industries in the world: commercial aviation.

Cristina recounts how she moved from business analysis into product leadership and then navigated a gruelling product development process during the pandemic. Her team faced the dual challenge of winning over both paying customers and aviation regulators to replace paper‑based cockpit workflows with a real‑time digital solution.

Chapters

0:00 | Introduction and personal background
 2:34 | Problem framing: launching a mobile app in aviation
 4:00 | Winning founding customers before building code
 6:10 | Consensus across customers and regulators
 9:00 | Involving actual pilots in design
 10:00 | Redesigning workflow not just digitising it
 14:15 | Scope control and prioritisation
 17:16 | Regulatory engagement and approval strategy
 19:49 | A hackathon that wasn’t a silver bullet
 21:06 | Reflections: what she would do differently
 25:22 | Balancing iteration with regulatory discipline
 28:21 | Triple validate in the real world
 29:53 | Signals of success and business impact

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 Lily Smith speaks with veteran product leader Sean Flaherty about a question at the heart of modern product management: how do you influence without authority? Drawing from behavioural science and decades of experience building products and teams, Sean outlines a framework based on self‑determination theory — the modern science of intrinsic motivation.

Through the lens of autonomy, competence and relatedness, Sean explains why traditional command‑and‑control leadership undermines creativity and accountability. He shows how true autonomy is structured freedom, how competence is demonstrated through behaviour, and how relatedness builds trust and advocacy among teams and users. Along the way he reframes accountability as something teams hold themselves to, not something enforced by fear, and discusses how leaders can help teams grow, adapt and thrive in a world of constant change.

Chapters
00:00 — Introduction & central question
01:30 — Guest background
04:45 — State of leadership today
06:10 — Intro to intrinsic motivation
08:40 — The “code” of motivation
12:28 — Autonomy in teams
17:11 — Competence and product work
20:30 — Observable behaviour and growth paths
23:10 — Adaptability and learning culture
24:25 — Accountability misunderstood
27:04 — Accountability spectrum
31:21 — Addressing negative behaviour
36:19 — AI and leadership change
38:01 — Leadership trends today

Key Takeaways
— Motivation is scientific, not abstract
— Product leaders need to understand the science of intrinsic motivation — not just processes or tools — to influence without authority and achieve sustainable outcomes.
— Three core motivators drive behaviour
Autonomy: people need meaningful choice, not chaos or micro‑management
Competence: motivation increases when people feel capable and are supported to grow
Relatedness: connection and shared purpose power trust, loyalty and advocacy
— Autonomy is structured freedom: Autonomy is not “do whatever you want”. It’s about balancing freedom with guidance so teams can be creative but not lost.
— Competence is observed in behaviour, not checklists: Real competence shows up in behaviour — what people do — not just knowledge or titles.
— Accountability emerges, not enforced: Traditional accountability relies on fear and external control. In contrast, self‑accountability arises when goals are meaningful and environments allow people

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.