Mind the Product
407 episodes listed below
Practical product judgment, tested in public.
The Product Experience is a working product-management show built around candid conversations with product people. Episodes translate real career paths and organizational problems into usable judgment about strategy, autonomy, validation, collaboration, and impact.
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The Product Experience is an interview show about product management as it is practiced inside real organizations. It is pragmatic. Episodes tend to start with a familiar product headache, then work toward the operating habits behind it: decision ownership, customer access, evidence, trade-offs, team structure, and commercial impact. Recent conversations argue that broad input is useful, but accountability for decisions has to be clear. They also separate strategic bets, product bets, and daily execution choices so leadership does not drift into micromanagement. The show moves across industries without treating product craft as one-size-fits-all. Aviation software brings customers, regulators, aircraft data, mechanics, and road-to-market constraints into the same product conversation. Media product work brings newsroom change, audience understanding, and people management into focus. Platform product management gets treated as more than internal efficiency, especially when teams need to explain value to business stakeholders quickly. The show is also comfortable with disagreement. A guest can challenge product democracy, and the hosts can let the tension sit long enough to become useful. Other episodes look at engineering teams that need more product thinking, feature validation inside enterprises, and the challenge of working better with sales and marketing. Customer contact returns again and again as a basic product discipline. So does the question of outcomes over output. The strongest moments come when guests name the hidden cost of vague roles, unchecked assumptions, and teams that ship into silence. The pace is conversational, but the subject matter is operational. It is less about product theater than about judgment under constraints. For product managers and product leaders, it offers language for meetings they are probably already having. For engineers, marketers, sales partners, and founders, it clarifies what product people are trying to protect when they ask for evidence, focus, or a harder conversation.
Made for: Product managers, product leaders, founders, engineering partners, and commercial teams who want grounded conversations about how product decisions actually happen. It especially suits listeners dealing with ambiguity, stakeholder pressure, customer discovery, or team maturity.
What sets it apart: The show stands out by pairing broad product themes with specific operating contexts: aviation software, media, health insurance, education, commercial work, and platform teams. Its best episodes turn messy organizational tension into concrete decision language.
The Product Experience features conversations with the product people of the world, focusing on real insights of how to improve your product practice. Part of the Mind the Product network, hosts Lily Smith (ProductTank organiser and Product Consultant) & Randy Silver (Head of Product and product management trainer) “go deep” with the best speakers from ProductTank meetups all over the globe, Mind the Product conferences, and the wider product community.
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A clear argument for product leadership as decision making, with a simple three-level framework for teams.
Blagoja Golubovski makes a practical case that product leadership is less about getting everyone on the same page than about making the call, naming the reason, and deciding what stays out.
Engineering works better when it starts with product context, not just code.
Matt makes a steady case that engineering teams do better when product context is treated as necessary, not optional. He keeps coming back to a simple point: strong developers ask questions, think past the code, and understand why the work matters.
Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia interviews CPOs from Shopify, Etsy, TikTok, and OpenAI.
Product lessons from technology's turning points.
Practical product thinking for stronger bets.
Practical product leadership beyond the framework.
Product craft from inside the build process.
An interview with a product leader about transitioning into product management roles and driving change in organizations.
This episode features an interview with Corinna Stukan, CEO of Bizzy, discussing how product leaders can align their work with business goals through prioritization, metrics, and strategic conversations.
A product management expert discusses her career in gaming UX, including journey mapping and player motivation at Riot Games.
Blagoja Golubovski, outgoing VP of Product at Usercentrics—a consent management platform operating across 195 countries with over 110 million ARR—argues that product management is not a democracy and that most product organizations fail because they confuse input-gathering with decision-making.
An interview with Cristina about her journey from business analyst to product manager in aviation software, discussing challenges and insights.
An interview with Mariah, Executive Director of Product at The Atlantic, discussing how to be a better manager of product managers.
Axel Soria, Atlassian’s product management evangelist, explains how his survey of more than 1,000 product professionals found that over 60% save more than two hours a day with AI while many still lack time for strategy.
Kasia Chmielinski, a technologist and Data Nutrition Project co-founder, explains how product managers can make responsible choices while working under launch, OKR, and investment pressures.
Matt Watson, founder of Full Scale—a software engineering firm with over 250 engineers in the Philippines serving 80 clients—argues that most engineering teams fail because they ship code into silence, never connecting their work to customer outcomes.
Prerna Singh, CPTO at Avaaz and former product and design leader at Meetup, explains how AI helped her prototype a community-organizing tool after a product-leader breakfast developed a 20-to-30-person wait list.
Randy Silver interviews Theresa Wang about her experience leading product enablement at Bupa and sharing tips on product management career growth.
Lily Smith interviews Vidya Dinamani about product maturity, the importance of customer access, and coaching product teams.
This episode features Jason Sparks discussing how to validate product features in enterprise settings to avoid costly failures and achieve product-market fit.
This episode explores how product managers can bridge the gap with marketing and sales to achieve greater business impact, featuring insights from commercial leader Sally Foote.
Randy Silver revisits a conversation with Francis, Chief Experience Officer at Tide, about continuous discovery and embedding it to accelerate team value.
Bridget West, Director of Product at DrDoctor, discusses the challenges and strategies of building health tech products, balancing safety with speed, and leveraging AI in healthcare.
Hosts Lily Smith and Randy Silver interview Jen Swanson about successful organizational transformations, focusing on product operating models and team alignment.
Randy and Lily celebrate Todd Green's promotion to president at King Games by revisiting their interview with him about product management in casual gaming.
Hosts interview Stack Overflow's CPTO about how AI is changing developer learning and their strategy to maintain quality and community engagement.
An interview with product consultant Jocko Torres about using four key principles to drive product culture during digital transformation at Gympass.