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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 company must be able to answer, from vision to principles — Why strategy is the most commonly missing layer in the stack, and why exec teams are often reluctant to fill it — How to challenge upwards and surface strategic gaps without calling leadership out — Why empowering teams without context sends them running in every direction — How principles — not values — are the tool that eliminates recurring debates — The "this or that" technique for making trade-offs visible across a team — Why you cannot communicate strategy often enough Chapters — 00:00 Introduction — 01:11 Martin's background in product — 02:19 The origin of The Decision Stack — 03:44 The five questions the stack answers — 04:27 Why strategy is most often missing or unclear — 08:18 Who should be making strategic decisions — 09:44 Time horizons: how long should strategy last — 11:43 Using the decision stack in practice — 13:36 How to surface gaps from lower in the organisation — 16:01 Why context is the prerequisite for empowerment — 19:32 How the stack reduces decision-making overhead — 21:04 Language, frameworks, and avoiding rigidity — 23:43 Where to start: top-down or bottom-up — 26:34 Fractal stacks and scaling across teams — 28:44 Strategy for maintenance work and existing products — 31:41 The role of principles at the foundation of the stack — 33:38 How principles emerge — top-down and bottom-up — 37:07 The "this or that" technique for surfacing trade-offs — 39:26 Communicating strategy continuously across the organisation — 43:34 The most common mistake when getting started Featured links The Decision Stack — Martin's new book: https://www.thedecisionstack.com/ The trade-off poll tool mentioned in the episode: https://thisorthat.thedecisionstack.com/ ProductTank:  Martin Eriksson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martineriksson/ HBR: The Office of Strategy Management — source of the 95% statistic cited in the episode: https://hbr.org/2005/10/the-office-of-strategy-management 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 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 product when you're building an agent is the experience layer on top of it, how synthetic personas work (and where they don't), and what discovery still requires that AI can't replace. Plus: what product sense means when everyone on your team is shipping code. Chapters  0:00 What is a product when you're building an agent? 1:00 Guest intro: Rags on getting into product at Google, YouTube, Meta, and now founding Floto 3:33 How the team at Floto actually works — and why it's "completely upside down" 6:01 Why building AI products forced a process inversion (and why speed made it necessary) 7:11 Agents and the experience layer: redefining what the product actually is 9:39 Running two to three products in parallel, and throwing away 50–60% of what gets built 14:31 Discovery principles that haven't changed — and the ones AI is helping with 18:15 Synthetic personas: where they work, where they don't, and the insight from flipping the question 22:03 The Product Experience Document (PXD): genesis, philosophy, and why it's not a PRD 25:57 Experience principles: encoding how it should feel to talk to an agent 27:06 Good, bad, ugly: why example interactions and anti-patterns are critical 28:55 Critical moments and closing conversations: designing the arc 33:33 Where this way of working applies — and where it doesn't 35:10 Hiring for product sense: why it now applies to every role 39:43 Final advice: what product people should not stop doing Featured Links Product Experience Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15kCm8ZcPqY12174WjyfuVLhrWOXGGqnB1vow7o_2ZqI/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.l62rzxz2fw6v Follow Rags on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ragsvadali/ 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.

Kate Kempe made the leap from 13 years at Amazon — most recently leading Alexa's screened products — to head up product at the International Baccalaureate, an NGO with no established product function. In this episode, she talks through what that transition actually involved: finding focus during a job search through Phil Terry's Never Search Alone methodology, reconciling Amazon instincts with a slower-moving, mission-driven organisation, and learning to be interested rather than interesting when you're the new person trying to make an impression. Chapters 01:07 — Kate's introduction 01:37 — From arts degree to Amazon: career origins 03:30 — Why leave Amazon? Finding the IB opportunity 05:08 — Never Search Alone: how the job search council works 10:37 — Building a personal inventory before committing to a role 13:38 — Amazon vs the IB: culture, pace, and decision-making 16:10 — Making the case in a mission-driven organisation 19:02 — Influence and persuasion — the "bus" analogy 23:44 — Building a product function from scratch 25:10 — Shifting from project delivery to product health 29:45 — Crossing domains: how to land and establish yourself 35:26 — Be interested, not interesting 37:50 — Advice for big tech → mission-driven transitions 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.

Pippa Topp, Chief Product Officer at giffgaff, joins Lily and Randy to talk about emotional intelligence in product teams — what it is, how it develops, and why it matters for leadership. The conversation covers recognising defensiveness as an EQ signal, the conscious competence model, applying empathy inward as well as outward, and how to cultivate a culture of reflection across a product org. Pippa also shares her own journey from judgement to over-empathy to finding the balance, and makes the case for self-belief as the foundation of emotional resilience. This episode is brought to you by Mailtrap, modern email delivery for developer and product teams: fast delivery. high inboxing rates. 24/7 expert support. Try for free today. Chapters 00:00 – Introduction & what is emotional intelligence? 04:39 – How low EQ shows up at work: defensiveness and reactive communication 08:28 – Extending product empathy skills to stakeholders and peers 10:33 – The conscious competence model and coaching people who don't know what they don't know 13:21 – Coaching techniques: life stories, separating facts from narrative 14:58 – Assessment tools and organisational EQ at giffgaff (Insights) 16:33 – Pippa's own EQ journey: from judgement to over-empathy to balance 22:37 – Coaching a junior PM through resistance, self-doubt, and breakthrough 28:40 – Leading through a forced decision: surfacing team emotion to move forward 32:39 – Cultivating EQ culture: group coaching, values-based behaviours, measurement 38:48 – Neurodivergence, self-awareness, and building a feedback culture 44:00 – Can AI support emotional intelligence? 47:41 – Is it okay to cry at work? 51:29 – Self-belief as the foundation of emotional resilience 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.

Elias Lieberich, Founder of Product Matters and formerly a PM at Google and YouTube, makes the case that the real gap between European and Silicon Valley product practice is in its culture. He identifies three recurring patterns in European companies: process obsession, a limited appetite for validation, and an underappreciation of engineering and design. Drawing on work with German Mittelstand businesses, deep tech startups, and large enterprises, Elias explains how to introduce product thinking without triggering resistance, through small, visible wins rather than wholesale transformation. This episode is brought to you by Mailtrap, modern email delivery for developer and product teams: fast delivery. high inboxing rates. 24/7 expert support. Try for free today. Chapters 00:56 – Elias's background: Google, YouTube, and Google X 04:08 – European vs. Silicon Valley product culture 07:43 – Three gaps: process obsession, lack of validation, undervaluing engineers 12:04 – What European companies actually want — and the copy-paste trap 13:34 – Show, don't tell: finding immediate value 15:37 – Bringing the whole organisation on the journey 25:02 – Roadmaps, frameworks, and meeting companies where they are 26:35 – Building trust through small, compounding wins 29:29 – Change aversion as a bell curve 31:02 – What European companies do well — and what's worth exporting 33:13 – Working with deep tech startups in Europe 36:44 – The killer question: who is this for? 40:25 – Practical advice: start with what's within your control 42:53 – 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.

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. This episode is brought to you by Mailtrap, modern email delivery for developer and product teams: fast delivery. high inboxing rates. 24/7 expert support. Try for free today. Chapters 00:01:30 — Introduction and Kate's background00:04:00 — Defining services vs. products00:07:00 — Product organizations vs. service organizations00:09:00 — Why service delivery is hard00:11:30 — Transformation in practice: there is no magic process00:13:30 — Starting with one area and cutting across silos00:15:30 — Common mistakes organizations make00:19:30 — Measuring progress and making the business case00:22:30 — Redirecting existing investment: a UK government example00:25:00 — Triage functions and portfolio management00:26:00 — How product people can contribute in service organizations00:30:30 — Kate's 12 principles00:34:00 — Summary00:37:00 — 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.  This episode is brought to you by Mailtrap, modern email delivery for developer and product teams: fast delivery. high inboxing rates. 24/7 expert support. Try for free today. 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 thinking05:52 — Using money stories as a sorting mechanism — and how to handle the "close this deal now" pressure10:54 — 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 returns26:57 — Why feature-level ROI almost never works — and why product leaders need to push back30:33 — The story archetypes: upsell stories explained38:02 — The retention/churn story archetype41:32 — Why product people get this wrong: fear of commitment and the need to be understood44:52 — How AI changes (and doesn't change) the money story framework48:58 — How to build financial literacy as a product managerOur 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.