The Product Experience (Mind the Product)

12 episodes scanned. 7% of ad slots promote the show's own products.

Recent Episodes

1. How to protect your creativity when everything is speeding up | Federico Casalegno, VP of Design, Samsung

   Oct 28, 2026

   Federico Casalegno, Executive Vice President at Samsung Electronics and head of its Design Innovation Centers and Global Studies, explains how Samsung uses 3D body scanning, machine learning, digital twins, and robotic testing to iterate on wearables such as earbuds, watches, and rings. He describes how some design tasks have shrunk from weeks to minutes while real-world user testing and designer judgment remain essential. The conversation also covers building small, multidisciplinary teams, hiring for curiosity, and keeping human needs central as AI tools become more powerful.

2. How to make your customers stay when anyone can copy your product | Rob Ferguson (VP, Fireworks AI)

   Oct 21, 2026

   Rob Ferguson, VP of Technology and Strategy at Fireworks AI, joins host Randy Silver to discuss what makes a competitive moat hold up when features can be copied within days. He argues that competition signals a worthwhile market, that customer proximity, proprietary data, and a clear point of view matter more than shipping speed, and that AI infrastructure choices affect cost and lock-in. The conversation also covers model mixtures, measurable evaluation, and forward-deployed teams.

3. How Google prototypes and ships at scale — Soufi Esmaeilzadeh (Google Search)

   Oct 14, 2026

   Soufi Esmaeilzadeh, product director for AI experiences in Google Search, discusses how her team leads AI Overviews and AI Mode, moving from natural-language query behavior to multi-turn search conversations. She covers how her teams go from hypothesis to prototype, demo, and beta quickly, how they balance speed against quality, and how they structure lean SWAT-style pods. The conversation also addresses publisher concerns about AI answers reducing clicks, personalization quality, and how hiring and team design are changing in the AI era.

4. Evals, Analytics, and How to escape the feature factory: Francois Lopitaux (SVP Product Management, ThoughtSpot)

   Oct 6, 2026

   Francois Lopitaux, SVP of Product at ThoughtSpot, discusses how building agentic AI products fundamentally changes the product development lifecycle compared to traditional deterministic software. He explores the shift from designing fixed user paths to creating probabilistic features with guardrails, the critical role of eval systems as the new PRD, and how organizations must maintain discipline and strong architecture even as AI accelerates prototyping speed by 2-3x. The conversation covers go-to-market complexity for embedded analytics, continuous model maintenance post-launch, and the evolving skill sets required for product managers in an AI-driven world.

5. Four questions to ask before building AI into your product — Kendra Vant (Chief Product Officer, Tapi)

   Sep 30, 2026

   Kendra Vant, Chief Product Officer at Tapi (a maintenance-as-a-service platform for rental properties), discusses the critical gap between AI demos and production-ready products. She introduces the concept of the "reliability layer"—the people, processes, and engineering required to make AI products dependable—and explains why highly motivated users of tools like Claude and ChatGPT provide this layer themselves, while end users of purpose-built products expect flawless performance. Vant shares four key questions product teams should ask before integrating AI into their products: what reliability work users are already doing, who provides the reliability layer, what customer trust costs when it fails, and what ongoing maintenance costs at scale.

6. How to fix your product roadmap — Matt Feczko (Director of Product Ops, Ocado Technology)

   Sep 23, 2026

   Matt Feczko, Director of Product & Engineering Operations at Ocado Technology, discusses how he overhauled the company's product roadmap process, rebuilt its Jira taxonomy, and created a product management skills framework that has since been adopted across engineering, design, and data functions. He shares lessons from his career spanning Microsoft, Skype, four startups, and now Ocado, focusing on how product operations serves as connective tissue in scaling organizations.

7. What is AI product management, really? Jonathan Evens (AI Product Lead, Google DeepMind)

   Sep 16, 2026

   Jonathan Evens, AI Product Lead at Google DeepMind, discusses what actually defines an AI product manager versus a PM using AI tools. He distinguishes between two roles: modeling product managers working on core model capabilities (factuality, reasoning, context handling) at frontier labs, and AI feature product managers building AI-powered products for end users. The conversation covers measuring success in AI products, the importance of product principles before evaluations, and how synthetic users can help with cold-start scenarios and privacy concerns.

8. What I learned from building, and exiting a startup — Kirsten Mann (Strategic Advisor)

   Sep 9, 2026

   Kirsten Mann, a board director and product leader, discusses her experience building and exiting Vizory, an AI tool that analyzed board packs for company directors. She shares lessons from testing product-market fit with friction-based validation, discovering mismatches between stated and revealed user preferences, and ultimately realizing that distribution—not the product build—was the core constraint. Mann reflects on why she decided not to pursue the enterprise sales path the market demanded and explains how those insights now shape her advisory work.

9. How to position your product for a future nobody can predict - April Dunford (Author of Obviously Awesome)

   Sep 2, 2026

   April Dunford, positioning expert and author of Obviously Awesome, discusses why companies across tech are repositioning simultaneously in response to major market shifts like AI. She explains how positioning is a company-wide decision affecting pricing, sales motion, and product roadmap—not just marketing messaging—and explores how leaders can develop a strong point of view on the future to guide strategic decisions during periods of uncertainty.

10. How to lead a product team through AI adoption - Tiama Hanson-Drury (CPTO, Opus 2)

    Aug 19, 2026

    Tiama Hanson-Drury, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Opus 2, discusses AI adoption in product teams and her unconventional career path from sales into product leadership. She emphasizes that while AI has removed software as a bottleneck, quality markers and outcome-focused work remain critical, and teams chasing adoption metrics without measuring actual delivery and code quality end up with burnout and technical debt. Hanson-Drury shares Opus 2's approach to AI—humans in the loop, daily shipping cadence, and three core team attributes: outcome focus over craft, curiosity, and a culture of sharing both success and failure.