The Product Experience: a Mind the Product podcast

April Dunford is the positioning expert behind Obviously Awesome and a former repeat vice-president of marketing across seven venture-backed startups, most of which were acquired. Over the past decade she has advised roughly 300 B2B technology companies, all with sales teams, on how to position themselves against the competition. In this episode she joins hosts Lily Smith and Randy Silver to explain why so many companies are repositioning at once, how a strong point of view on the future underpins good positioning, and why the story a company tells about itself is a decision for product and sales, not just marketing.
Key takeaways
Positioning is a company-wide decision, not a marketing exercise. Dunford's own experience repositioning a spreadsheet tool as an embeddable database shows how it reshapes pricing, sales motion and even the product roadmap, not just the words on a website.
Major shifts such as the move to AI force widespread repositioning because customers no longer have a stable set of alternatives to judge value or price against, and both AI-native companies and traditional SaaS businesses are wrestling with where they now sit.
Intercom's rebuild of its support product around Fin shows how staying anchored to the customer's underlying job, resolving a ticket, can guide a genuine AI-first redesign rather than a bolt-on feature.
Companies need a clear, credible point of view on the future of their market, or customers facing genuine uncertainty will simply freeze and delay buying decisions.
A compelling vision of the future has to flow from a company's real differentiated value, not be reverse-engineered to flatter its current position.
Selling too far into a hyped future risks stalling deals, so the message needs a maturity model that shows customers a credible, low-risk path from where they are today to where the market is heading.
Positioning should be revisited on a disciplined schedule rather than settled by whoever argues loudest in the room, and Dunford recommends a structured check every six months on competitors, differentiators and value themes.
Customer advisory boards, quarterly executive account calls and a company's own sales team are the most reliable early-warning systems for shifts in budget, buying process and competitive threats, long before they show up as lost deals.
Chapters
(00:00) Introduction to April Dunford 
(01:53) The story behind Obviously Awesome 
(05:33) Positioning as a cross-functional decision 
(07:23) Why everyone is repositioning right now 
(09:32) Intercom, Fin and the AI-native rebuild 
(11:53) Building a point of view of the future 
(16:52) Is the vision genuine or self-serving 
(18:00) How to develop your point of view 
(22:13) Stack Overflow, Salesforce and staying silent 
(23:45) Hyping the future without stalling sales 
(27:01) When positioning needs to change 
(28:42) Running a regular positioning check-in 
(30:29) Customer advisory boards and voice of customer 
(34:47) Predicting change after covid and AI 
(37:20) 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.

Julia Barham leads a CX acquisition team at Progressive Insurance and is the author of The Product Management Playbook, published by Rosenfeld Media in July 2026. She wrote it to close what she sees as a coaching gap in the profession: a decade of product transformations has produced far more people with the title than people who have been taught end-to-end craft. In this episode she makes the case for treating ambiguity as a condition of the job rather than a problem to be solved, and walks through the things that quietly break when a product starts to scale.
Key takeaways
Frameworks come and go, but the questions endure. Julia structured her book around why something matters, who it is for, what needs building and when, because no methodology eliminates ambiguity, it only reduces it.
Organisational ambiguity is the least discussed of the four ambiguities PMs face, and the one that separates individual contributors from leaders. Waiting for the perfect operating model, funding model or team shape is a way of not moving.
If you have to be in every room to answer every question, you are scaling chaos. Durable artefacts, bug severity rubrics and self-service dashboards let the team make calls without you.
Synthesis is where shared context gets built, and offloading it to an AI tool quietly removes the thing that made it valuable. Do it together, monthly, with the customer, platform and business data in the same room.
Chasing growth before product market fit turns your economics upside down. Products commonly take two years to find fit, sometimes five, and retention is the strongest signal that you have it.
Julia spent nine months fixing latency on an inherited platform because of shortcuts taken at launch. The cost was measured in millions of lost revenue, not just engineering time.
Attaching a monetary value to technical debt is what turns a product manager from a stick in the mud into a steward of the business. Treat your product like a P&L whether you own one or not.
A product at scale needs a portfolio, not a backlog: optimisation, strategic bets, capability work, and honest capacity set aside for run-the-business support.
AI belongs in the toolkit, not in the chair. If you cannot call BS on the output, you do not know enough to be doing the job.
Chapters
(00:00) Don't scale chaos
(01:01) Introducing Julia Barham
(03:01) The coaching gap that prompted the book
(03:57) Why the book is built around questions, not frameworks
(06:06) Has product management ever been deterministic?
(07:47) The four ambiguities every product manager faces
(10:00) Does organisational ambiguity change with company size?
(12:57) The 21 plays and how to use them
(15:35) Getting your reps in across the product lifecycle
(17:07) What breaks when products and teams scale
(17:59) Mistake one: needing to be in every room
(20:30) Building shared context across distributed teams
(23:51) The ways of working exercise
(24:19) Mistake two: chasing growth before product market fit
(25:56) How to measure product market fit
(27:16) Mistake three: scaling expensive problems
(29:42) Putting a price on technical debt
(31:54) When taking on debt is the right call
(34:22) Naming the mode your product is in
(35:09) Mistake four: running your product as a portfolio
(37:39) The one problem Julia would make disappear
(39:25) What AI changes, and what it does not
(42:26) Wrap-up
Referenced
The Product Management Playbook, Julia Barham, Rosenfeld Media: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/product-management-playbook/
Use discount code MTP20 for 20% off at Rosenfeld Media
Sample chapter: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/sample-chapter-the-product-management-playbook/
Dan Olsen and the product market fit pyramid: https://dan-olsen.com
Testing Business Ideas, David Bland
Progressive Insurance: https://www.progressive.com
Pioneers, settlers and town planners, Simon Wardley: https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html
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.

Tiama Hanson-Drury is CPTO at Opus 2, the legal technology company behind the systems that run some of the world's largest and most high-stakes litigation. She started her career in sales, moved into product in 2010 and has spent the last 16 years split roughly evenly between individual contributor and leadership roles. Her verdict on AI in product organisations is neither evangelism nor scepticism: the tooling has removed software as a bottleneck, but the markers of quality that mattered before AI have not changed, and teams that forget them end up shipping slop and burning out. In this episode, we discuss:
Why a sales background is better preparation for product than an engineering one, and how to lead engineers without pretending to be an expert
How the promise of doing more with AI is producing overload and burnout, and what leaders owe their teams in response
Why high AI adoption scores mean nothing if pull request sizes are ballooning and someone else has to review the output
The three things Tiama looks for in her teams now: outcome focus over craft, curiosity, and a culture of sharing failure as readily as success
Why the right move is not to hand three of your seven steps to AI, but to start again from the outcome you want
How Opus 2 went from shipping every six to 12 weeks to shipping daily, and why that made documentation and planning more important, not less
The case for betting on humans in the loop when your customers explicitly prefer it
Why Opus 2 is still hiring juniors, and how to build commercial judgment when the groundwork can be skipped
The one situation where Tiama tells people to let AI write the first draft rather than the second

Chapters
(01:31) From sales to product
(03:24) Why the move is less obvious than it sounds
(04:34) Leading engineering without an engineering background
(06:28) How outsider questions sharpen engineering teams
(07:36) What AI has changed for a CPTO
(08:16) Overload, burnout and the pressure to token max
(10:32) Adoption scores versus quality signals
(11:39) What AI adoption actually looks like inside law firms
(12:42) Outcomes over output
(14:07) How Opus 2 built its AI strategy
(16:07) Removing friction from an AI rollout
(16:53) Partnering with AI instead of splitting up the steps
(18:08) A message from Mike Belsito
(19:40) Three things AI asks of a team
(21:47) More agency, and why planning matters more
(23:51) Scaling a team on conflicting evidence
(26:09) Betting on humans in the loop
(27:36) Why Opus 2 keeps hiring juniors
(29:44) Building judgment when the work moves faster
(32:36) Sharing your own AI operating system
(33:22) AI slop, CVs and the hiring algorithm
(36:17) Top tips for a product career in the age of AI
(38:36) Wrap-up

Referenced
Opus 2: https://www.opus2.com
Opus 2 announces addition of Tiama Hanson-Drury as chief product and technology officer: https://www.opus2.com/news/opus-2-announces-cpto-tiama-hanson-drury/
Minna Technologies, where Tiama was previously chief product officer: https://minnatechnologies.com
DX, the developer intelligence platform used to track squad performance: https://getdx.com
DORA metrics: https://dora.dev
Vote for Mike Belsito's South by Southwest 2027 session: https://tinyurl.com/belsitosxsw
Where to find Tiama Hanson-Drury
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiamahansondrury
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.

Blaine Billingsley is a Member of Technical Design Staff at OpenAI whose path into the field ran through music composition, spare-change website work at college, and a decade across Gmail, Airbnb, YouTube and Slack. At OpenAI he was hired to work on Presence, then redirected to solve a more immediate problem: making ChatGPT genuinely useful as a daily tool for designers. Working with a single engineer, he built the ChatGPT product design plugin — a bridge between the raw power of Codex and the day-to-day workflow of product teams. In this conversation with Randy Silver, he talks about what design actually means when your interface is a text box, why volume beats perfection in an age of infinite iteration, and why the fundamentals of good product thinking are more durable than the tools used to apply them.

Key takeaways

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

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

Featured Links
ChatGPT for Work: https://openai.com/chatgpt 
Codex: https://openai.com/codex 
Figma: https://figma.com 
FigJam: https://www.figma.com/figjam 
Linear: https://linear.app
Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.
Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Dr Cat Hicks is a psychological scientist and the founder of Catharsis, a human-centred research consultancy that works with engineering organisations. After self-funding her first open-access study into developer motivation, she was recruited to lead the Developer Success Lab at Pluralsight — a three-year programme that generated large-scale empirical research across hundreds of companies and more than 11,000 developers. Her book, The Psychology of Software Teams, published in July 2026, brings that evidence to bear on the question her industry keeps asking: why do smart people in smart organisations so often struggle to work well together? We talk about the hidden costs of treating developers as interchangeable units, what large-scale cycle time data reveals about individual performance, and how product managers can build the conditions for teams to actually thrive.

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

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

Referenced
The Psychology of Software Teams by Dr Cat Hicks
The Programmer's Brain by Felienne Hermans
The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg
Developer Success Lab (Pluralsight)
DORA project
Catharsis — Dr Cat Hicks's consultancy
Fight for the Human — Dr Cat Hicks's newsletter
Dr Cat Hicks
Learning Opportunities Claude skill — by Dr Cat Hicks
Deliberate practice and chess improvement study (44,000 Chess.com players)
Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.
Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.