The Product Experience: a Mind the Product podcast

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Why you're not falling behind on AI - Barry O'Reilly (Author, Artificial Organizations) May 27, 2026

Show notes

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

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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.

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.

How PMs can win with open source - Dan Ciruli (Product Leader, Nutanix) May 20, 2026

Show notes

Dan Ciruli is VP and General Manager of Cloud Native at Nutanix. A computer science graduate of UC Berkeley, Dan spent a decade in engineering before pivoting to product management in 2003, a role that barely had a name when he started. Since then he has held product leadership positions at EMC and Google, where he was part of the team that helped create Kubernetes and open source Google's cloud infrastructure.
He was a founding member of the OpenAPI Initiative and a steering committee member for the Istio service mesh project, and has spent the last two decades with one foot in commercial product development and one in the open source community.
In this episode, Dan explains why open source is not a charity exercise, how companies actually make money from code they give away for free, and what product managers get wrong when they tell their engineers to avoid it.
Key takeaways
— Open source is not crowdsourcing from individuals — much of the contribution comes from companies investing on the clock, because broad adoption benefits everyone more than proprietary lock-in.
— The CNCF succeeded because it created a neutral space where the largest and smallest organisations felt equally safe contributing and consuming. That structure — not the code itself — is what made cloud native computing universal.
— Being a product manager in open source requires the same core instinct as any other PM role: understanding the why. The difference is that your engineers may work for a competitor, and your roadmap is not entirely yours to control.
— AI is multiplying the capability of both good actors and bad actors in open source security. The answer is not to slow adoption but to keep a credible human in the loop — someone with accumulated trust, judgement and accountability.
— Before open sourcing your own work, be clear on how your company will make money, articulate it concisely for leadership, and then find at least one other organisation — even a competitor — willing to join you. A consortium signals a standard. A solo release signals a gamble.
Chapters
1:16 — From engineering to product management
3:11 — Bridging open source and commercial work
5:05 — The origin of Kubernetes at Google
6:35 — How Nutanix embraces open source
7:16 — The crowdsourcing misconception
8:51 — Why the CNCF changed everything
11:25 — Building a defensible moat in open source
12:13 — The business models behind free code
14:18 — Managing roadmaps you don't fully control
15:04 — When your competitor writes your code
16:04 — The CEO who wore his secrets around his neck
18:13 — Developing an open source strategy
19:37 — The one question every PM must ask
22:44 — What is the CNCF?
23:34 — AI, open source and the security arms race
29:45 — Chop wood, carry water: the human in the loop
31:48 — Advice for PMs running open source products
33:15 — Harnessing a community you don't manage
34:38 — Should you open source your own work?
36:35 — How messy does it really get?
39:33 — Linux is an anti-pattern

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What I learned from unbuilding products and systems in the Public Sector - Ayushi Roy (Product Leader) May 13, 2026

Show notes

In the private sector, product teams pick their customers, generate demand, and ship into something close to a green field. In the public sector, none of that holds. Ayushi Roy — Chief Program Officer at New America's New Practice Lab and a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School — joins Randy to unpack what changes when your user base is already sitting in front of you, your scrutiny is congressional, and the right answer is sometimes to delete ten systems rather than build an eleventh.

Drawing on her work on IRS Direct File, the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the Illinois childcare voucher system, and a text-based 911 alternative that rolled out to 800,000 students across 13 universities, Ayushi makes the case for a distinct public-sector product playbook: thin-slicing for safe failure, designing for the lowest digital denominator, separating design problems from engineering problems, and treating unbuilding as a first-class option.
Chapter markers
01:48 — From aid monitoring in Jordan to digital delivery
03:37 — Why she built a text-based alternative to 911
06:33 — From a rollout to 800,000 students to Oakland City Hall
08:58 — What the New Practice Lab does, and what a CPO does inside a think tank
11:06 — Why private-sector product playbooks don't transliterate
14:03 — No marketing, no early adopters: latent demand and the curb cut effect
14:40 — Oakland's eviction tool, MacBooks, and the lowest digital denominator
17:30 — Thin-slicing IRS Direct File without losing Congress
22:36 — Building executive sponsorship that allows safe failure
23:41 — Product vs service: the rest of the job that isn't writing code
26:09 — Illinois childcare vouchers: when modernising the form makes things worse
29:22 — Design problems, engineering problems, and the laptop-hinge analogy
33:18 — Can AI prototyping close the policy–implementation gap?
35:40 — The FAFSA simplification crisis and the case for bilingual builders
37:31 — Unbuilding: how a request for a 15th CHIP system became one to remove ten
41:18 — What keeps her going

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Everything you need to know about product messaging— Diane Wiredu (B2B, SaaS, Marketing, leader) May 06, 2026

Show notes

In this podcast episode, Diane Wiredu, Founder and Messaging Strategist for Lion Works, underscores the significance of this key element. Diane breaks down a step by step guide on effective messaging, while also providing insights on engaging customers and growing products.

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AI ate their search traffic. Here's what Springer Nature built instead — Prathik Roy Apr 29, 2026

Show notes

Prathik Roy is Product Director for Data and AI Solutions at Springer Nature, one of the world's largest academic publishing companies. A quantum chemist and material scientist by training, he spent years in R&D before gravitating towards product management — and has spent the past 12 years helping publishers understand the value locked inside their content. In this episode, Prathik makes the case that publishers are sitting on some of the most strategically valuable data in the world, and that most of them are only beginning to understand what that means in the age of AI.

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Introduction: from quantum chemistry to product management
(05:00) The Schrödinger problem: why content value is increasingly unknowable
(08:00) How traditional publishing metrics worked — and why they broke
(11:30) The ChatGPT moment and its impact on scientific publishing
(15:00) Paywalls, subscription models, and the shift to data licensing
(21:30) How scientific content earns its quality — and why AI cannot just follow the citations
(26:00) Why AI developers want bullet points — and what that means for content structure
(29:00) New monetisation models: tokens, outcomes, and data as a service
(33:00) Rights management: rights in, rights out, and why the prohibited section matters
(36:30) Measuring content value when your users live inside AI systems
(38:00) What to do with your content archive: extraction, licensing, and prediction markets

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How to connect vision, strategy, and execution - Martin Eriksson (Author, The Decision Stack) Apr 22, 2026

Show notes

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

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The document that can replace PRDs — Rags Vadali (Founder & CEO, floto.ai) Apr 15, 2026

Show notes

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/

We're refreshing The Product Experience and want your input. Take our two-minute survey and help shape where the show goes next!

What I learned from an industry pivot - Kate Kempe (Director of Product, International Baccalaureate) Apr 08, 2026

Show notes

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

We're refreshing The Product Experience and want your input. Take our two-minute survey and help shape where the show goes next!

How to build EQ as a Product Leader - Pippa Topp (CPO, giffgaff) Apr 01, 2026

Show notes

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

We're refreshing The Product Experience and want your input. Take our two-minute survey and help shape where the show goes next!

The state of product in Europe - Elias Lieberich (Product Strategy Coach) Mar 25, 2026

Show notes

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

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