The Product Experience

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
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.

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.
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.

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
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.

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
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.

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/
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.