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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Kate Tarling — consultant, trainer, and author of The Service Organization — joins Lily and Randy to discuss what it takes to deliver great services inside large, complex organizations. The conversation covers the distinction between products and services, why transformation so often stalls, how to make the business case for change using existing investment, and how product people can contribute to, and benefit from, a more service-oriented way of working.

Chapters

• 00:01:30 — Introduction and Kate's background
• 00:04:00 — Defining services vs. products
• 00:07:00 — Product organizations vs. service organizations
• 00:09:00 — Why service delivery is hard
• 00:11:30 — Transformation in practice: there is no magic process
• 00:13:30 — Starting with one area and cutting across silos
• 00:15:30 — Common mistakes organizations make
• 00:19:30 — Measuring progress and making the business case
• 00:22:30 — Redirecting existing investment: a UK government example
• 00:25:00 — Triage functions and portfolio management
• 00:26:00 — How product people can contribute in service organizations
• 00:30:30 — Kate's 12 principles
• 00:34:00 — Summary
• 00:37:00 — Examples of good service organizations

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.

Rich Mironov has spent decades watching product teams lose the room because they were speaking the wrong language. In his new book Money Stories, he makes the case that product managers need a second vocabulary: one built around revenue, retention, and return.

In this conversation, he walks through the core framework, why order-of-magnitude estimates beat false precision, how to build a roadmap that holds its ground against sales pressure, and what the AI moment has in common with the early days of mobile.

Chapters

• 02:03 — What are money stories, and why do executives need them?
• 03:59 — How accurate do you actually need to be? The case for order-of-magnitude thinking
• 05:52 — Using money stories as a sorting mechanism — and how to handle the "close this deal now" pressure
• 10:54 — Tagging roadmaps with revenue ranges and the "or principle"
• 15:58 — Does every PM need this, or just senior leaders?
• 21:46 — The two flavors of ROI: earning your keep vs. feature-level returns
• 26:57 — Why feature-level ROI almost never works — and why product leaders need to push back
• 30:33 — The story archetypes: upsell stories explained
• 38:02 — The retention/churn story archetype
• 41:32 — Why product people get this wrong: fear of commitment and the need to be understood
• 44:52 — How AI changes (and doesn't change) the money story framework
• 48:58 — How to build financial literacy as a product manager

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.

Laura Teclemariam has had one of the most varied careers in product — from mobile gaming economies at EA to building Netflix's animation studio from the ground up, to owning LinkedIn's core identity products. In this episode, she joins Lily and Randy to trace the through-line of her "jungle gym" path, unpack what gaming taught her about retention, why entertainment sharpens your product instincts in ways big tech can't, and how she's now teaching the next generation of PMs at UC Berkeley — with AI at the centre of everything.

Chapters
00:00 — Intro: The feedback you didn't see coming at LinkedIn
02:00 — Laura's background: engineer, founder, consultant, PM
03:50 — Why a nonlinear career is more coherent than it looks
06:00 — Gaming as the most honest product environment
07:20 — Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, mods, and retention crisis
09:00 — How gaming metrics (DAU, retention) predicted big tech's future
12:10 — Data ends debates in tech; taste ends them in entertainment
13:05 — Netflix Animation: building a studio's product function from scratch
15:15 — Storyboards as prototypes, animatics as MVPs
19:40 — Tool consolidation: going from 400 to 130 tools across productions
22:05 — Build vs. buy decisions when the budget is a feature film
26:40 — What it takes to hire PMs for entertainment vs. general tech
28:20 — STAR interviews and evaluating stakeholder chops
29:20 — Why LinkedIn came next: curiosity about social network retention
31:50 — The weight of building for 1B+ users and LinkedIn's trust-first culture
35:50 — Profile, Messaging, Groups: LinkedIn's original value proposition
37:00 — Teaching advanced product management at UC Berkeley
38:10 — The course thesis: AI for everything, and the "great convergence"
42:00 — Does the PM/design/engineering triad collapse with AI?
45:30 — What Laura's students taught her about curiosity and safe-to-fail environments

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.

Corinna Stukan, Product Leader and Founder of Fintech marketplace Bizzy, lays out practical advice for connecting your product roadmap to business goals. She explains how a metrics one-pager aligns day-to-day product decisions with company goals, why understanding whether your business is in growth, acquisition or cost-control mode should shape every prioritisation call, and how to frame initiatives so stakeholders see commercial impact, not just better UX.

Chapters
4:00 — Why product people should care about business acumen
6:01 — Organisational causes of weak commercial context for PMs
8:10 — What business acumen means in practice
9:10 — Wake-up story: prioritisation shifted after asking the CEO about revenue drivers
11:05 — Misalignment: company goals vs team OKRs
12:13 — How to run the metrics one-pager and link product to business goals
14:37 — Strategy: where we are, where we’re going, how we’ll get there
15:03 — Encouraging ideas while setting business context
17:01 — Running collaborative bets before creating the roadmap
19:20 — Communicating value: turn “better onboarding” into business impact
22:08 — Avoiding over-attribution and internal attribution fights
23:05 — Example: marketing’s 12 touchpoints and joint contribution to acquisition
24:26 — Practising stakeholder storytelling; where LLMs help and don’t
29:17 — Presentation craft: fewer slides, start with numbers, end with actions
31:03 — Using LLMs for synthesis, not hu

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.

Alan Byrne, Product Leader for Mozilla’s Firefox extensions ecosystem, argues that the best product work is less doctrine and more judgement. In conversation with LRandy Silver, he breaks down why prioritisation frameworks like RICE and MoSCoW often masquerade as science while quietly embedding subjectivity—and why he prefers writing clear “what and why” statements over chasing false precision.

From his experience at QuickBooks and Twitter, Alan explores when PRDs are genuinely valuable (complex systems, high risk, trust and safety concerns) and how to keep them lean enough to stay useful. The discussion also digs into the tension between moving a metric and doing right by users, the dangers of gamifying growth, and how product managers can translate customer problems into narratives that align engineers, executives, and sales.

Chapters
03:30 Product as philosophy
04:41 Studying product vs learning in the field
07:25 The real job: understand users and their “why”
08:21 Why prioritisation frameworks often fail in practice
10:58 Decision-making without false precision
13:14 Goal-led roadmaps and narrative alignment
14:22 Metrics, ethics, and avoiding gamification traps
18:35 When PRDs help, and how to keep them lean
22:37 Prototyping, vibe coding, and where it falls apart
25:14 Communication, compromise, and working documents
27:36 Preventing overbuild and defining “good enough”
30:39 Handling “can’t you just…” from sales and marketing
33:28 What Alan wishes he knew five years ago
34:49 Explaining product management to non-product people

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.

Cheryl Platz, Cheryl Platz, former UX Director for Riot Games, Scopely and Author of "The Game Development Strategy Guide," returns to The Product Experience to explore how video game design principles can transform product development.

From her time at Riot Games and Marvel Strike Force to teaching at Carnegie Mellon, Cheryl shares hard-won lessons about player motivation, onboarding, and building products that thrive. Discover why competition is no longer the primary driver of modern gaming, how a children's game taught her about gendered design assumptions, and how she turned a catastrophic server outage into a UX win that made Reddit happy.

Chapters
06:03 Game development is cloud services plus filmmaking
07:08 The problem with silos in game studios
08:24 “Modern” games: live service, messy business models, shifting tastes
09:58 Defining a game: players decide if you got it right
11:41 Motivators of play and why they matter to product people
12:26 Disney Friends: the moment a playtest rewrote the design
17:19 Classic vs modern motivators: what technology changed
20:41 The research that challenged the “games are competition” assumption
22:36 Why game lessons translate to enterprise software (and where gamification goes wrong)
25:19 Pro-social design: trust, safety and communities at scale
28:33 Designing for companionship and shared experiences
34:43 Onboarding as growth strategy, not a “nice to have”
37:38 Journey mapping 100 levels: making invisible drop-off visible
39:25 On-demand learning beats one-and-done tutorials
41:58 Advice for people trying to break into games during layoffs
44:36 Turning a sixth anniversary outage into a UX win

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.