In this episode of The Product Experience, host Randy Silver speaks with Teresa Huang — Head of Product for Enablement at global health‑insurer Bupa — about the often‑overlooked world of platform product management. They explore why building internal platforms is fundamentally different and often more challenging than building user‑facing products, how to measure the value of platform work, and practical strategies for gaining stakeholder alignment, driving platform adoption and demonstrating business impact.

Chapters
0:00 – Why “efficiency” alone no longer cuts it — measuring platform impact in business terms
1:02 – Teresa’s background: from business analyst to head of product in health insurance
6:20 – What we mean by “platform product management” — internal tools vs marketplace vs public‑API platforms
7:44 – Why you need to “hop two steps”: address developer needs and end-customer value
10:24 – Types of platforms: internal APIs, marketplace ecosystems, public‑facing platforms (e.g. like Shopify)
10:55 – Reframing platform work: building business cases instead of chasing “efficiency” metrics
13:16 – Linking platform initiatives to core business goals and joint OKRs
15:47 – The importance of visualisation — using prototypes and role‑plays to communicate platform value
20:57 – Internal showcases: keeping stakeholders engaged with real‑world scenarios
23:28 – Success metrics for platforms: adoption, usage, reliability, ecosystem growth
26:00 – Retiring legacy services: deciding when low-use tools should be decommissioned
28:55 – From cost centre to enabler: shifting the narrative to show value creation

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 episode of The Product Experience, host Randy Silver sits down with product veteran John Cutler to explore why creating great products remains one of the hardest things organisations do. They dive into why so many companies adopt off‑the‑shelf models (“Spotify”, “SAFe”, etc) and still struggle, and how the secret often lies not in what you build but how you build it—specifically the game you design for how you work.

Chapters
00:00 — The stigma around “how you work”
00:54 — Introducing John Cutler (again)
01:25 — What John’s building at Dotwork
02:46 — From fun to formal: doing discovery at scale
04:04 — Why process became a bad word
05:10 — The “cavalier PM” mindset
06:28 — Empowered teams vs. harsh realities
08:00 — What great pockets of practice have in common
09:03 — Managing up vs. doing the right thing
10:24 — Playing the game vs. designing the game
11:20 — What makes a great internal game
12:33 — Defining success: thriving, surviving, progressing
13:46 — Environmental design: why leaders hesitate
15:10 — Making intentional design less intimidating
16:42 — Tools, rituals, and the power of checkpoints
18:23 — The behaviour design playbook
20:41 — Removing blockers: access, repetition, reflection

We’re taking Community Questions for The Product Experience podcast.
Got a burning product question for Lily, Randy, or an upcoming guest? Submit it here.

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...

In this episode, Nina Olding, Staff Product Manager at Weights & Biases and formerly at Google DeepMind, working on trust and compliance for AI, joins Randy to explore the UX challenges of AI‑driven features. As AI becomes increasingly woven into digital products, the traditional UX cues and trust‑signals that users rely on are changing. Nina introduces her framework of the three “A’s” for AI UX: Awareness, Agency, and Assurance, and explains how product teams can build this into their AI‑enabled products without launching a massive transformation programme.

Key Takeaways
— As AI features proliferate, the UX challenge is less about the technology and more about how users perceive, understand and trust the interactions.
— Trust is based on three foundational dimensions for AI‑enabled products: Awareness, Agency, Assurance.
— Awareness: Make it clear when AI is involved (and when it isn’t). Invisible AI = risk of misunderstanding. Magical AI without context = disorientation.
— Agency: Give users control, or at least the option to opt‑out, define boundaries, choose defaults vs advanced settings.
— Assurance: Because AI can be non‑deterministic, you must design for confidence—indicators of reliability, transparency about limitations, ability to question or override outputs.

Chapters
00:00 – Intro: Why AI products are failing on trust
00:47 – Nina Old’s journey from Google DeepMind to Weights & Biases
03:20 – The UX of AI: It's not just a chat window
04:08 – Introducing the Three A’s framework: Awareness, Agency, Assurance
08:30 – Designing for Awareness: Visibility and user signals
14:40 – Agency: Giving users control and escape hatches
21:30 – Assurance: Transparency, confidence indicators, and humility
28:05 – Three key questions to assess AI UX
30:50 – The product case for trust: Compliance, loyalty, and retention
33:00 – Final thoughts: Building the trust muscle

Featured Links: Follow Nina on LinkedIn | Weights & Biases | Check out Nina's 'The hidden UX of AI' slides from Industry Conference Cleveland 2025

We’re taking Community Questions for The Product Experience podcast.
Got a burning product question for Lily, Randy, or an upcoming guest? Submit it here.

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...