The Product Experience

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.

Dave Martin has spent more than two decades in product leadership, with a string of C-suite roles, a couple of exits and a book, The Product Momentum Gap, to his name. He is also dyslexic and ADHD, and has built a career while masking the effort it takes to "think normal". 
In this episode he makes the case that the advice handed to neurotypical leaders often fails the roughly half of tech workers who are neurodivergent, and lays out a practical playbook for landing your message, leading the room and progressing without pretending to be someone else. 
Chapters
00:00) Welcome, and Dave's background in product
(02:03) "I've been masking it": faking thinking normal
(02:37) The meeting where your idea is ignored, then credited to someone else
(03:28) AI as a "spell check for influence"
(04:07) The myth that growth requires pretending to be neurotypical
(05:15) Why standard leadership advice fails neurodivergent leaders
(06:45) Executive presence, signal presence and signal drift
(07:57) Is this universal, or specific to neurodivergence?
(09:48) From "dumb kid" to writing C++ at ten
(11:27) When a word processor flipped his Fs to As
(13:24) The trap: leading with detail
(15:42) The boardroom moment that gets you labelled "not strategic"
(17:05) Designing for re-tell: what the room repeats when you leave
(18:19) Three mistakes that kill your influence
(19:36) The CALM framework
(21:32) Authority and the signal prep exercise
(22:14) Three questions: outcome, one-line recommendation, re-tell
(24:44) "Minutes not months": seeding the line that gets repeated
(26:56) Learning: vulnerability and psychological safety
(28:27) Momentum, well-being and burnout
(31:21) Why burnout is a leadership fault
(32:01) Mia's story: the head of product who wanted to be CPO
(34:20) Recognising the trigger and practising signal prep
(37:06) When stakeholders started calling her strategic
(38:31) The opposite trap: abandoning detail entirely
(39:22) Why some leaders step back into IC roles
(41:16) Free training and AI as your spell checker for influence
(42:26) Closing thoughts
Key takeaways
— Authenticity is not the goal; deliberate communication is. Dave's central provocation is that "be your authentic self" assumes everyone in the room thinks the way you do. For a leader who sees patterns instantly and works in deep, hyperfocused bursts, behaving authentically can mean failing to explain the obvious and struggling to empathise with those who need the journey, not just the destination.
— The symptoms are universal, the tax is not. Everybody's message gets lost in meetings. What separates neurodivergent leaders is the cognitive cost of noticing that drift and correcting it. As Randy and Dave agree, the tools discussed here help everyone, but the impact is far larger for those paying the higher tax.
— Leading with detail is the career trap. The very trait that makes someone an exceptional individual contributor, the ability to go deep and surface every edge case, can sink them in the boardroom. 
— Answer a strategic question with edge cases and you are labelled "not executive" with alarming speed, and undoing that label takes months of work.
— CALM is the alternative. Clarity, authority, learning and momentum, delivered calmly. Authority comes from being clear on the outcome and the ask, asking for support and guidance rather than permission, and not feeling obliged to justify every edge case.
— Signal prep is the practical tool. Three questions: what do I need from this room; what is my one-line recommendation; and what will they repeat when I am not in the room. A bonus question for higher-stakes meetings asks what the room feels now and how you want them to feel when you leave.
— Design for re-tell. Dave's example of a leader who reduced a lengthy objective to "minutes not months for our customers", and repeated it, is the clearest illustration. That phrase, not someone else's reframe, is what got repeated in the room afterwards.
— Well-being underpins momentum. Dave nearly named the framework around well-being. Without a sustainable pace, leaders cannot lead, and the unprocessed meeting that keeps you awake at 3am is a momentum problem. He frames widespread tech burnout as a leadership failure, because leaders set the expectation.
— AI is a spell checker for influence. Just as a word processor turned Dave's Fs into As without changing his brain, AI tooling can help neurodivergent leaders translate their thinking into the right language for the room, supporting the communication without doing the thinking or the judgement for them.
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.

Barry O’Reilly is an entrepreneur, author, and founder of Nobody Studios, an early-stage venture studio focused on building AI companies. Over the last six years he has worked with founders, executives and enterprise leadership teams to rethink how organisations operate in the age of generative AI, while simultaneously building and launching companies inside the studio model.
A former startup advisor and executive coach, Barry has spent the last several years studying why most AI transformations fail despite enormous investment. Through his coaching and advisory work with leaders from companies including American Airlines, Skyscanner, and Slack, Barry has developed practical frameworks for improving decision-making, reducing administrative overhead, and increasing what he calls "decision velocity".
In this episode, Barry explains why AI adoption fails when companies focus on tools instead of behaviour change, why judgment is becoming the most important human skill, and how teams can use AI to improve collaboration rather than replace people.
Key takeaways
 — Most AI transformations fail because organisations start with tools instead of behaviours. Installing AI software does not change how people work, make decisions or collaborate.
 — The most effective AI use cases amplify a person’s natural way of working. Barry realised he produced better writing by talking through ideas and using transcription tools instead of forcing himself into traditional writing workflows.
 — Capturing meetings, conversations and decisions as structured data creates long-term organisational intelligence. Every interaction becomes a reusable asset that improves preparation, follow-through, and future decision-making.
 — Leaders must role-model AI adoption themselves. Organisations see better outcomes when executives openly experiment with tools, share lessons learned, and create psychological safety around adoption.
 — Decision velocity matters more than raw productivity. Teams improve when they arrive prepared, make decisions faster, reduce reversals, and spend more time solving meaningful problems instead of handling administration.
 — AI should be used to challenge thinking, not replace it. The most valuable prompts ask for blind spots, alternative scenarios, and pressure tests rather than definitive answers.
 — Teams working with AI outperform individuals working with AI. Barry cites research showing that collaborative ideation with AI produces significantly stronger outcomes than isolated use.
 — Productivity gains are meaningless if they simply create more exhaustion. The real opportunity is creating space for reflection, slow thinking, and better judgment.
 — Judgment is the critical human capability organisations cannot outsource. If people stop exercising judgment and rely entirely on AI-generated answers, they gradually erode their ability to make decisions under uncertainty.
Chapters
 1:03 — Building AI companies at Nobody Studios
 3:16 — Why AI transformations fail
 5:05 — The danger of focusing on tools
 6:35 — Discovering natural workflows with AI
 8:51 — Turning conversations into data assets
 12:02 — Measuring successful AI adoption
 13:14 — Why leaders must role-model behaviour change
 18:39 — Decision velocity as a leadership metric
 21:33 — Escaping administrative overload
 23:02 — Why leaders need time to think
 26:54 — What CFOs are worried about
 28:08 — Can AI replace startup teams?
 29:45 — Why distribution still matters most
 33:13 — Capturing and synthesising ideas with AI
 34:38 — Using AI to challenge your thinking
 37:11 — Avoiding top-down AI-driven strategy
 39:00 — Why teams plus AI outperform individuals
 42:31 — The problem with AI-generated certainty
 43:12 — Preserving human judgment
 44:55 — Hiring for judgment and decision-making
 47:19 — Final reflections on leadership and AI
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.