The Product Experience

Charity Ibhadon is a Global Product Director at WPP, where she leads the development of an AI marketing tool. With 15 years in product — including three formative years at ASOS during its high-growth heyday — she came to the discipline via a decade in investment banking and an executive MBA. She has operated at VP and CPO level, leading large international teams across consumer technology and media.

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

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

Referenced
Eisenhower matrix | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priorit...
Charity's keynote at #mtpcon London |    • Product is Hard. It should still be fun: C...  
Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.
Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Vonny Laing is a user-centred design lead at the Student Loans Company, part of the UK government, where she oversees a service used by millions of people at every stage of their higher education journey. She has held roles spanning UX design, content design, and head of design across both public and private sectors, and completed an MBA specifically to earn the language of business — and with it, a seat at the table where design decisions get made.

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

Chapters:
(00:53) Welcome and introductions
(01:23) Vonny background
(02:10) Moving fast in the civil service
(04:02) The UK government digital community
(05:05) The pyramid model
(07:03) Underserved versus edge case users
(08:09) Designing at population scale
(09:43) Service assessments and design accountability
(11:01) Discovery research methodology
(13:25) Finding users invisible in the data
(16:22) Bridging gaps you cannot fix
(18:42) Eat your greens: needs versus wants
(20:07) Designing for users over time
(21:04) Worst-case scenario thinking
(22:11) Mining complaint logs and prioritising
(25:47) Why synthetic users fall short
(28:12) Where automated testing has a role
(29:19) Leave the building: guerrilla research
(33:03) Communicating research through storytelling
(36:29) Why Vonnie did an MBA
(39:03) Design's ceiling in organisations
(42:04) Wrap-up
Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.
Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Recorded live at #mtpcon London, Lily sits down with Emily Tate — former MD of Mind the Product for a broad debrief on the day's themes. They cover why product and design may matter more in an AI world than ever before, how heritage organisations can navigate transformation without the luxury of greenfield conditions, and what it actually takes to get internal stakeholders on side. Emily also makes a case for why SaaS isn't dead, why positioning fundamentals haven't changed despite the AI frenzy, and why remote work is draining the fun out of product teams.
Chapters
0:00 — Intro
1:00 — The state of AI in product: still an inflection point
3:18 — AI is a technology, not a moat
4:57 — Keeping the humanity in product work
6:13 — Advice for PMs new to the industry
8:38 — Why conferences need both practical and inspirational talks
10:24 — How to start speaking: find your local ProductTank
13:46 — You don't need a novel idea to give a great talk
16:01 — Charity Ibhadon's talk: product is hard, but it should be fun
16:19 — Remote work and the slow erosion of joy at work
19:15 — Innovating inside heritage organisations
21:39 — Stop trying to educate stakeholders about product
24:06 — April Dunford on positioning: what AI changes, and what it doesn't
27:00 — The SaaS-pocalypse myth
28:47 — Predictions: 12–18 more months of heavy AI talk
30:59 — Filtering signal from noise: where Emily reads
31:40 — Eric Ries' Incorruptible and building companies that resist corruption
Key takeaways
If your only moat is AI, you don't have a moat. AI is a capability, not a product. The question is how you're using it to serve customers better than you could before — not whether you're using it at all.
Building is no longer the bottleneck — deciding what to build is. That shift makes strong product and design thinking more important, not less.
Stop trying to teach stakeholders about product. Drop the methodology, use their language, show them something tangible, and bring them along in ways that make sense to them — not to you.
SaaS has a defensible edge. Products built on experience across hundreds of customers carry knowledge that a single company building its own solution can't replicate. That's a positioning story worth telling.
Positioning fundamentals haven't changed. Sprinkling AI on your messaging doesn't sharpen it. Outside of tech, leading with AI can actively damage trust.
You don't need a novel idea to give a great talk. Your version of a familiar concept might be the one that finally makes it click for someone. Start at a local ProductTank.
Don't try to be someone else on stage. Find your style by doing it. Authenticity beats borrowed charisma.
Remote work is eroding team joy in ways we're not measuring. The informal moments that build relationships and make work fun don't happen on Slack or in back-to-back video calls — and the resulting friction is real.
Featured links  
Incorruptible by Eric Ries — https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/460881/incorruptible-by-ries-eric/9780241692028
The Decision Stack by Martin Eriksson — thedecisionstack.com
Christian Idiodi — Silicon Valley Product Group
April Dunford — aprildunford.com
Find your local ProductTank — producttank.com
Mind the Product — mindtheproduct.com
Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.
Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Lindsey Jayne is an independent product adviser and coach, and former chief product officer at the Financial Times. She began her career at the Government Digital Service, where she stumbled into product management by chasing someone down a corridor holding a MacBook that actually worked. What followed was 15 years moving through startups, scaleups, and ultimately one of Britain's most storied media institutions.
Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
01:08 — Lindsey's origin story: from a broken government laptop to product management
02:48 — Why product managers burn out: accountability without authority
05:34 — Influencing stakeholders using discovery skills
07:19 — What leaders can do to clear the way for their product teams
08:44 — Stakeholder mapping: the influence and interest framework
09:41 — Recognising burnout signals in your team at scale
11:16 — Balancing passion and sustainability: when enthusiasm becomes a pattern
14:16 — When to transition from individual contributor to product leader
16:24 — Product reviews and cross-team knowledge sharing
18:42 — How to communicate effectively with senior stakeholders
20:40 — Career-defining advice: you don't have to die on every hill
21:43 — Half your job is landing the product, not just building it
22:25 — The most common mistake junior product managers make
24:05 — How to tell your story after a difficult or toxic company exit
Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.
Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

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