The Product Experience

A deep dive into the state of product in 2026 — Emily Tate (VP Product)

• Mind the Product

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0:00 | 34:58

Recorded live at #mtpcon London, Lily sits down with Emily Tate — former MD of Mind the Product for a broad debrief on the day's themes. They cover why product and design may matter more in an AI world than ever before, how heritage organisations can navigate transformation without the luxury of greenfield conditions, and what it actually takes to get internal stakeholders on side. Emily also makes a case for why SaaS isn't dead, why positioning fundamentals haven't changed despite the AI frenzy, and why remote work is draining the fun out of product teams.

Chapters

  • 0:00 — Intro
  • 1:00 — The state of AI in product: still an inflection point
  • 3:18 — AI is a technology, not a moat
  • 4:57 — Keeping the humanity in product work
  • 6:13 — Advice for PMs new to the industry
  • 8:38 — Why conferences need both practical and inspirational talks
  • 10:24 — How to start speaking: find your local ProductTank
  • 13:46 — You don't need a novel idea to give a great talk
  • 16:01 — Charity Ibhadon's talk: product is hard, but it should be fun
  • 16:19 — Remote work and the slow erosion of joy at work
  • 19:15 — Innovating inside heritage organisations
  • 21:39 — Stop trying to educate stakeholders about product
  • 24:06 — April Dunford on positioning: what AI changes, and what it doesn't
  • 27:00 — The SaaS-pocalypse myth
  • 28:47 — Predictions: 12–18 more months of heavy AI talk
  • 30:59 — Filtering signal from noise: where Emily reads
  • 31:40 — Eric Ries' Incorruptible and building companies that resist corruption

Key takeaways

  • If your only moat is AI, you don't have a moat. AI is a capability, not a product. The question is how you're using it to serve customers better than you could before — not whether you're using it at all.
  • Building is no longer the bottleneck — deciding what to build is. That shift makes strong product and design thinking more important, not less.
  • Stop trying to teach stakeholders about product. Drop the methodology, use their language, show them something tangible, and bring them along in ways that make sense to them — not to you.
  • SaaS has a defensible edge. Products built on experience across hundreds of customers carry knowledge that a single company building its own solution can't replicate. That's a positioning story worth telling.
  • Positioning fundamentals haven't changed. Sprinkling AI on your messaging doesn't sharpen it. Outside of tech, leading with AI can actively damage trust.
  • You don't need a novel idea to give a great talk. Your version of a familiar concept might be the one that finally makes it click for someone. Start at a local ProductTank.
  • Don't try to be someone else on stage. Find your style by doing it. Authenticity beats borrowed charisma.
  • Remote work is eroding team joy in ways we're not measuring. The informal moments that build relationships and make work fun don't happen on Slack or in back-to-back video calls — and the resulting friction is real.

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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.

SPEAKER_00

If your only moat is that your product is AI, you're gonna be replaced by anyone with lovable in their living room. Building is not the bottleneck, and now deciding what to build becomes the bottleneck. What do we need to be thinking about? What's your kind of like take on how people need to think about positioning? Positioning challenge gets harder is the fact that basically everyone thinks that they can just build what you have built with Club Code in a weekend. One thing that makes a lot of SaaS products and SaaS companies special, they are building products based on experience across a broad market. How are you using the AI technology to serve your customers in a better way? Don't try to be anyone else, just try to be yourself. And that's what will make your talks or your presentations good.

SPEAKER_01

What's your predictions for the next sort of five years?

SPEAKER_00

The pendulum swung really far to AI everything. AI is gonna kill all the jobs, and we're about to enter the phase of like just throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall.

SPEAKER_01

Emily, welcome back to the product experience. How are you doing? Doing well. So excited to be here. I know it's great to have you. And as ex MD of Mind the Product and now CPO, um, you obviously have a very unique perspective on the conference and also about kind of the content that product managers consume generally. What has been your kind of main takeaway from all of the topics that have been covered today? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

I mean, obviously, the you know the most obvious one is AI. Um, and it is undeniable that it's covered in every conference, every podcast, every meetup that you're gonna go to right now. And the reason is because it is so impactful on our industry right now. Um, we are we are still in an inflection point. I think there was a big step change in AI and its capability, kind of December-January time frame. And we still don't know exactly what that's going to mean for our roles, for our teams, for how technology is going to change overall. And so we're still all figuring it out. And I think um I know every product leader is thinking about how do product and design adapt to an AI world? How does engineering change in an AI world? And specifically, in a world in which building is not the bottleneck and now deciding what to build becomes the bottleneck. What do we need to be thinking about? Um, I think, you know, one of the things I've been really encouraged about with the way that the topics are rounding up this year is I think we have moved a little bit past the product is dead, design is dead, all of our jobs are going away. And actually, product and design might be even more important in a world where we can build anything quickly.

SPEAKER_01

I think, yeah, I a hundred percent agree about that. And the other thing that I think is really interesting about the way that the topic around AI is coming together is it's it's about using AI as a tool in your work, but then also about thinking about how you serve your customers and staying very kind of customer-centered in terms of like what's the value that you're adding and the the AI features that you're building into your products, like not just throwing any old AI slop out there and you know, really kind of focusing on the customer as part of that strategy and consideration.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, AI is just another technology. Like it's it's not, you know, I think back to when like blockchain was the hot topic and it was like people were like, I'm gonna build a blockchain product. And it's like, what problem are you solving with blockchain? Because it was just a you know, fancy database, for lack of a better term. Um, at the end of the day, AI is a very similar thing, only more powerful and more relevant in my personal opinion. Um, it is not a product in itself. Like, if your only moat is that your product is AI, you're gonna be replaced by anyone with you know, lovable in their living room. So it's really figuring out how are you using the AI technology to serve your customers in a better way than you could have if you were just building in regular automation features.

SPEAKER_01

I think we are like we've seen this before as well with like big data and apps, and you know, like you say, blockchain, there's always something that comes along, but it feels like like you say, AI is different, it's it's such a fundamental shift. It is much more like the internet, absolutely in terms of like the impact that it's gonna have and it's gonna keep being a conversation that comes up again and again. But I think that one of the other things that's been interesting at the conference is um charity's talk around, you know, product is hard, but we should still have fun. And walking around with charity, kind of after she did her talk, walking around the conference, so many people were saying, Thank you, I needed to hear that. So, what else have you kind of like heard other than AI?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think that like um there there is definitely a theme around the people behind the products uh and kind of how in this world that's moving so fast and changing so fast, how do we make sure that we're not losing the humanity behind it? Um, and I think this is a theme that I've also heard in other conversations with product leaders, because you know, when you when productivity can go up and we have the tools to let us do more faster, and I should say I'm even seeing this in some of my teams, I think that we naturally feel pressure to work more and work even harder. And rather than like taking that productivity gain back for ourselves to be able to have more time and brain space and uh be able to like pursue creative endeavors, we instead just naturally want to like, oh, I can build twice as much. I should push myself to build three times as much. Yeah. Um, and so I think it's good to have those conversations coming about in in venues like this where we can kind of remind ourselves that, you know, like you said, this is fun. Like it really is exciting to get to build products that impact people's lives, but we have to do it in a way that's sustainable for us and a way that is sustainable for humanity as much as we can.

SPEAKER_01

I love that. So if someone's coming to mine the product for the first time, and I feel for product managers that are kind of just entering the world of product right now, because it is a bit of a kind of overwhelming space, let's say, uh, like you say, with this talk, all of the talk with AI and um, you know, such seismic change. What kind of topics and themes would you steer them towards in order to, you know, get get give them a sense of like the foundations of product management, even before you kind of pile in the AI side of things? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Um, I'm gonna give the most product manager answer ever, which is it depends. Um, it really, I think each person is gonna have something different that they need to take out of the conference. And that's why there is a variety of topics. That's why there are, you know, there are talks today that are about how to use AI for productivity. There's talks about how to put AI into your products to build features. There's talks about personal things, there's talks about working in regulated industries and in kind of transforming companies as opposed to greenfield startups, and there's lessons from greenfield startups and and what they've learned. Um, you're not going to be able to take something from every talk. And I think people put a lot of pressure on themselves to fully absorb multiple lessons from 10 talks throughout the day. It's impossible. I think from my perspective, having gone to, having gone to many conferences over the two decades I've been in this career and then run conferences for a long time, it's more about finding one or two talks that speak to you. And even within those talks, one or two points. Like if you can take away two to three things that then tomorrow you can go think about a little bit more deeply, the conference was worth it. Um, don't feel like you have to engage with every topic and every subject. It's pick something that fits where you are with your product and your career. Sometimes even just something that feels like I want some inspiration from this. I think most of the value out of coming to a conference oftentimes isn't really even the actual content on the stage while the content is very good. It is purely stepping out of work for a day to have some time to think about your craft, get re-energized about what you're doing, and be able to go in and tackle those same problems with a fresh perspective.

SPEAKER_01

One of the other things I think is quite interesting about the agenda for this conference is we have that mix of practitioners who are, you know, in the detail, kind of working in the way that most of the people who listen to the podcast will be working. And then the sort of more inspirational people, people like Christian Idiot, people like April Dunford, and then Professor Brian Cox, who clearly is not a product manager. Right. What makes that mix work of the kind of inspirational and I suppose maybe more aspirational type of talk versus the much more practical?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. I think if we got way too down in the weeds and only had very, very tactical talks, um, I'll be honest, first of all, in a crowd of 2,000 people, it's hard to get something that's going to be practical for every person in the crowd because what everyone's dealing with is different. Um, and so having those kind of very practical talks are good for people to take away some tools and techniques. Um, but you also do need that inspirational side of things, both from uh making sure that there's something that everyone can connect to, but also, again, just kind of lifting your head up and getting out of the weeds. That's that's so much of the value of being here is pulling yourself out of the day-to-day. Um, and that aspirational side kind of reminds us why we do this. Um, it can get really tough when you spend your days in, you know, status update meetings and are looking at your data dashboards and working on your funnels and looking at all of the different, like very kind of granular things within your product. Um, it can be hard to remember like why we're in this at all. And so having those those kind of inspirational, aspirational talks just kind of gives us that little extra burst of energy.

SPEAKER_01

And you mentioned earlier you've obviously got loads of experience running events and you know working with speakers um to create a great talk. If anyone's listening to the podcast and they're thinking, I want to, I want to do this, like I want to share some of my stories, like we love it first. Yes. But what's the best way for them to, you know, to to craft that talk and to kind of put that together and get it out into the world? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Um, step one is find your local product tank. Um find any local meetup because that is how you start to basically the best way to start speaking is to just do it. Everyone feels like I need to wait until I've had this level of success or this thing. Um, I, you know, I gave my first talk when I frankly I didn't know what I was doing. I had like one little nugget of a story and something I had tried that worked, and I put it into a talk and did it at a meetup, and it went over well. And then that started giving me uh, you know, more frankly, more confidence to be able to do that again. And I think as you're crafting talks, it really is about the stories. Um, and we know that in product management, storytelling is one of the key skills that we need just to be successful in our roles because we have to be able to inspire and enroll and craft that narrative even within our companies. It's the exact same skill set when you're when you're giving a talk. It's figuring out, okay, what is the point that I'm trying to make and what stories can I use to support that? And what is that narrative? I always focus on, you know, whenever I'm giving a talk, again, the thing that I'm hoping is that people will take one thing out of it. And oftentimes there are multiple points that someone could take out of my talks, and I don't expect every point to hit for every person in the audience. Um, if you try to like hit everybody with everything, first of all, you'll never be successful in doing that, and it will just stress you out. So focus on telling your version of the story, your version of what has worked, what hasn't worked, the point that you're trying to make, and then just hope that people will take one thing.

SPEAKER_01

Uh it's one of the things that I think is such an amazing skill for a product manager to learn is you know, how to put a story together and how to get a point across. And doing a talk is like it's such a good way to just practice getting up and standing up in front of other people and you know, I guess just like not feeling overwhelmed. And um, so yeah, I think even if you don't necessarily want to be a speaker or you know don't have ambitions in that regard, just putting yourself out there and doing a bit of practice of um talking about your craft, talking about like what you're doing as a as a case study, even and and how you're working. And I think people always want to hear stories like that because it helps them understand like where they are on their own journey, or even if it's like they haven't learned anything new, but it's just revalidated something that they they already felt, or you know, maybe they thought they were the only person who was feeling that way, or something like that. So it's yeah, I I feel like people shouldn't be too worried about whether they're coming with a unique point of view or anything like that. It's more about just using that experience to hone your uh storytelling skills and your communication skills and presentation skills.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, the number one thing I hear from people is, oh, I would like to give a talk, but I don't have anything new to say. And it's like you might not have a brand new novel way of approaching product, but you do have a perspective on it and you do have a story of where something has worked or where something hasn't. And the way you describe it might be the difference between somebody else being able to understand that concept when it didn't click with somebody else before. Yeah. Um so it's good to have multiple people saying the same thing in different ways because it gives, it gives us, you know, everyone's brain works a little bit differently and everyone's gonna connect with different things. Uh the other thing I would say on speaking is um don't get too caught up in trying to be like a different speaker. Um I hear a lot as well of like, well, I don't have the charisma of Christian idiote. I don't have uh, you know, the I can't craft a narrative in that way. Um and the reality is like you will you will find your style by doing it and by practicing it. And there are great speakers who are really kind of quiet and more like even keeled. There are great speakers who are big and like have a lot of presence on stage and pace back and forth on the stage, and then there are some who will just stand in the center of the stage and you just need to do what feels comfortable to you. Um, I always, you know, the some of the talks that I love are ones that have a very nonlinear storyline and like feel like you're just being taken on a journey. Um, that's not how I naturally craft stories. And if you look at my talks, I often have basically a theme that then has like three to five points on that theme. Um, because that's how my brain organizes my thoughts. Do I wish that I could craft the like meandering and you don't even realize how you got to this point in the story and then it gets to like a really great point? Absolutely. Like I love C. Todd Lombardo's talks. He was always just, you know, like there's there's people like that that you know just have a really interesting way of storytelling. But I'm I'm not gonna be able to do that. I can do what I do, and it and the way that I tell stories clicks with a lot of people. And so um, don't try to be anyone else, just try to be yourself. And that's what will make your talks or your presentations good.

SPEAKER_01

Nice. So diving into some of the topics at the conference, um, let's have a little chat around some of those. One of them was um, as we mentioned earlier, charity's talk around product is hard, so you know we need to remember to have fun at work. What's your take on this?

SPEAKER_00

I think it's really important, and I think actually it's something that I'm seeing lost a lot in teams. And I think not only is AI impacting that, I actually controversially probably think that remote working is really having a big impact on this. Um, back in the old days, when we used to go into offices all the time, you had those moments in between meetings where you got to know your coworkers, you got to, you know, you got to just kind of have some fun in the office, and people would bring in cakes and you would just like be silly at times. And now, because everything has moved to remote, everything's so much more transactional. And you only get on calls when you have a, you know, business to do with someone, or you're doing things asynchronously on Teams or Slack or wherever. And actually, I've started to see a lot more conflict building in some of our teams that I realize over time. I'm like, this is truly just because they are never in the same place. And so you build up frustrations with people in a way that means you start talking past each other and you start avoiding each other because you can, because you're not in the office together. And it means that you have a lot less fun at work. And I think that actually regaining that fun and regaining that joy is really important because, you know, frankly, like we spend way too much time at work for it to be miserable. And we do need to find those ways to capture that joy, engage with our colleagues, figure out the kind of the humanity around people again, and uh and just be able to spend less of our day frustrated.

SPEAKER_01

I hadn't thought about it at all as being like a remote working issue, but you're so right. And it was funny the other day I was in the office and um I had mentioned Golden, the song, the K-pop song. Hopefully everyone knows what I'm talking about. But there was people in the office who were like, What? I don't know what you're talking about. Um and I put it on, and then we were all like singing, and I mean not all of us, but everyone who knew the song was singing and dancing around the office, and it was just such a lovely moment. You're like, Yeah, this is why we all come to the office and like, you know, have those little moments, and you just don't get that when you're going on a call, then to have a meeting about a very specific thing. Yeah, there's not that time, or it doesn't feel like there's that time to just be fun or silly or whatever, especially when we're like, you know, cramming in 30-minute back-to-back meetings all day.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And so you're tired by the end of the day and you don't have time to just have those conversations and get to know that this person, you know. I mean, I went to the Harry Styles conference last weekend, and uh, you know, people that have hobbies that they enjoy and like getting to know those little bits of things. Um, I I try to make it actually a point to inject those personal anecdotes, however silly they may be, um, because I do think it just it just makes us all relate more than when we just are about the business.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I agree. Uh so you had it here. You have permission to be silly. Absolutely. Tell silly stories, make people dance around to golden. Um of the other topics was um innovating and heritage organizations, which um surely must be a huge challenge now. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00

Uh this this I I know very well. Um I work in a very large veterinary care company, um, you know, a PE-backed business with lots of legacy technology, and it is not the AI native organization. And I think that you know, the reality is way more of us work in those kinds of organizations than people who are working in the cutting-edge AI-native organizations. Um, and I think a lot of, particularly in these kind of non-tech companies that are trying to add technology plays in, um, there's even a bigger learning curve in terms of even what it means to build products. And like the AI journey that the executives are going on is different than the AI journey that executives in a tech company are going into. Um, not to mention regulation and lots of, you know, kind of compliance issues and challenges and the security things that come up when you're a larger organization. Um, everything is just kind of, it's just there's more friction. Yeah. Uh, and it's just harder. But I think it's important for us to really continue to push ourselves in in that realm. Um, so I thought that that was a really great topic. Uh, you know, he's coming out of building the building an NHS app and how you innovate in an organization that, you know, is literally political and um and has kind of a lot of legacy things surrounding it. So I'm I'm hoping that a lot of people can find some good inspiration out of there and again just kind of get excited to go in and continue to push forward in these organizations.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, we had um one of the questions we had earlier um in the audience was very much around the the the basics of like I work in an organization, they don't really understand product. How do I help them understand product, but also AI? Yeah. Um I think it's just like it's a difficult, it's a difficult question to answer. It's like maybe get a support group.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. I think the biggest thing is um stop trying to teach people about product.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Like they don't care, they they really do not care about our discovery practices, they don't care about iterating and starting small and you know, all a build, measure, learn. They they just want their problem solved. Um, and the more that We try to like do things right and like use the product language, actually, the more alienating we are, because first of all, it can sound really arrogant. It sounds like you're trying to come in and tell me that you're gonna be the savior of me and my cra and my business when actually I know way more about my industry than you do as the tech person, which is true. Now we have techniques and tactics to help kind of uncover the pain points and be able to help solve the problems. Um, but we're not gonna do it if we come into it from a like, I am here to educate you on this new thing called technology. Um, instead, use the language that they use, just kind of start doing things and don't try to win the philosophical battles. Yeah. Um, I, you know, we had a situation where uh one of our teams was like really wanting to, you know, we were kind of building in an iterative way, building kind of a read-only version of a of a product, and then we were going to be adding in the additional functionality. And they were talking to the operations team about we want to pilot the read-only version. And the operations team was like, why would we do that? Like that makes no sense. That doesn't add any value. And frankly, they were right about that. But what we were not, what we were saying is not we want to ask the teams to use this, we just want to get some feedback on it. And my advice to the team was basically like, stop trying to win the philosophical battle up front with this whole we need to pilot and we need to get things, you know, kind of we need to go about this in a in a product y way. Just build the thing, and then we'll go to ops and say, hey, we've built something. Can we get some of our clinics to look at it? Yeah. Can can we get some people to take a look and tell us what they think about it? That is the pilot that we wanted to do. But by trying to have that conversation up front, people were digging their heels in, they weren't understanding, and it was kind of building friction between. Instead, we just switched it to say, we have a new shiny thing, want to take a look? Yeah. And then they're on board. So um I think less education, more just kind of getting on with it, and then bringing people along on the journey in ways that make sense to them, not ways that make sense to us.

SPEAKER_01

Uh that's such a good piece of advice. Um, okay, so the the final topic that I was gonna bring up as well was April's um talk around positioning. Uh so again, AI kind of like swooping in here and just being like, no, you are all AI businesses now. So, what what's your kind of like take on how people need to think about positioning? And I guess positioning from a business point of view and you know, from your overall business and how it sits in the market, but you may even need to think about like the positioning of your product within an organization as well.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Um, I I think, you know, as with many things with AI, like the the fundamentals of positioning don't change. You still need a story, you still need basically like why why do you exist? What are you here for? Um, and again, just like sprinkling AI on it doesn't magically make that positioning better. I think where the the positioning challenge gets harder is the fact that basically everyone thinks that they can just build what you have built with cloud code in a weekend. Um I think in, you know, in some cases they can. I the the reality though is where people might want to build something with Cloud Code in a weekend, they don't actually want to maintain it and continue to improve on it. So I think figuring out how you how you message what makes your product special and like why people should want to use what you have done. I, you know, there's been the whole kind of SAS pocalypse, no one's gonna buy SaaS products anymore. I don't believe that at all. Um, because I think that actually one thing that makes a lot of SaaS products and SaaS companies special is that they are getting to see how hundreds or thousands of companies are approaching the same problem. Yeah. And they are building products based on experience across a broad market, not just what they've heard from one company. And I think when people are saying, oh, I don't need to buy a SaaS product because I can just build my version of it on my own, you're really limiting how much you can learn and how much you can know of what other companies are doing. And you are building, like, let's say you're trying to build five or six different things within your company that you would have bought SaaS products for. Um you are trying, you are building like a person, a portion of something that an entire team is thinking about 24 hours a day and has deep expertise in. And I think that that expertise and that um kind of the deep research and knowledge that we have in our domains and in our products can become a part of that positioning and and the why would you buy this over building it in lovable. Yeah. Um, so I think that it's it's gonna be a change in how we think about that messaging. Um, I also think, as well, when it comes to positioning, I think that some of this is a little bit of a tech bubble problem when it comes to AI and and how I convince people to use my thing. Um, I think that we really overestimate how much people want to connect to MCP servers and build their own things out in the rest of the normal world. Like, like we're all like, yes, give us all the access and we want to build our own thing, and I don't want the product. But like, you know, my mom doesn't want to try to figure out Claude Code and how to how to connect to things. And, you know, it's it's just most of society just wants the products. They don't want to have to think about this. So um I think that it's gonna be very unique for the people who are in like enterprise SaaS and selling technology to technologists, but I think a lot of the rest of the positioning is gonna remain the same.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Um in fact, I think in some in in a lot of other industries that aren't tech, I think that positioning yourself as AI first is actually a downside. Um, because there is so much backlash against AI outside of the tech world. Um and there are so many, there's a lot of people out there who basically are like, if you, if your product uses AI, I'm not touching it. Yeah. Um and to be honest, a lot of people are conflating things that are automations that have been around for decades as AI because they don't like it. So um I think it's kind of knowing your audience, knowing what makes your product special, and then crafting that positioning around it is it's gonna be tricky, but I I don't think that the fundamentals have changed.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I think that's such a good point. I mean, what my kids are just like, ugh, AI, yeah. Um so okay, with your content hat on again, um, what's your predictions for the next sort of five years? Like, what are we gonna be talking about in the future?

SPEAKER_00

Oh my goodness. I can't predict pr predict the next five months, much less the next five years. Um, I think that I I mean, I think we're in for another 12 to 18 months minimum of heavy AI talk um just because we don't know what it's gonna do yet. We all know it's changing things, we're all experimenting with it, we're all seeing pockets of productivity gains, we're seeing pockets of new opportunities open within our products. But I don't think that anyone has really truly like been able to replicate the productivity gains and understand like what it's gonna mean for the shape of our teams, what is going to be the, you know, it used to be seven engineers to one product manager and one designer, and like we all kind of knew that. We don't know what that ratio is gonna be. Is it two to one? Is it three to one? Is it the same? And it's uh, you know, actually we just we just don't know yet. So I think that we're gonna be in another 12 to 18 months of exploration. Will it go beyond that? I mean, probably. I I just I can't predict that far out with the pace that things are changing. Um, it will steady out at some point. I think it's like the the pendulum swung really far to AI everything, AI is gonna kill all the jobs, and we're gonna every company is gonna be two people and a set of agents. Um I think that that, I think we're gonna, we're about to enter the phase of like just throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall, and we're gonna see a lot of move fast and break things again, and we're gonna see a lot of really terrible products being put out. Um, I think the pendulum will swing back a little bit more to the middle of like, all right, maybe, maybe not AI everything, but it is gonna have an impact. It's never gonna go back to where we were. Yeah. Um, but I think it will steady out, and maybe in another, you know, 18 months to two years we might have different conversations again.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And what's your what are your kind of like go-to sources of information? Like, where do you love reading about all of this stuff? I mean, well, mind the product, of course.

SPEAKER_00

Uh boss. But uh, you know, I say that legitimately. I I think, you know, it's interesting from from my perspective, a lot of it is trying to suss out the signal from the noise because everybody has an opinion right now. Some people are posting big inflammatory opinions because it gets them more clicks on LinkedIn or their blog or whatever. But I do find, frankly, a lot of the content on LinkedIn, but you have to be, you just have to be conscious about who you're listening to and what is clickbait basically versus what is legitimate thinking. Um, there's there's been quite a few books lately that have come out that I've been really excited about. Actually, the couple that have been signed out here with Martin Erickson and Nezreen. Um, we've got some some great things coming out. But yeah, it's really just finding the people who are being thoughtful. So it's hard to say exactly like where because they come in different pockets and different things. Yeah. Um, I think it's less, you know, one source that I go to. And Eric Reese has just written a book called Incorruptible. Yes. Um, I actually had the pleasure of being one of the test readers on that book. And it's like I found it simultaneously incredibly inspiring and incredibly depressing. Um, because you know, the the entire point of the book is is basically how do we the the current economic systems that are out there and the current current governance best practices are effectively built to build to extract value out of companies. Um and so you end up with like a company that was really special that puts all of the best practices of governance in place, and then they IPO and then they do the things, and basically all of the mechanisms around suck out what was special, strip it for parts, and leave shells of companies that we once knew and loved. And I think that we have all seen this in a lot of our favorite products and a lot of our favorite companies. But there are companies that have built different forms of governance structures and different things in place that basically protect them from being corrupted. So, you know, examples are things like REI in the US that has really maintained that Patagonia, um, John Lewis here in the UK is one that has some unique structures that keep them from basically having those same playbooks enacted because it's heavily employee-owned. Um and basically his the book is giving really a playbook on how you can set things up to keep your company in a way that will like retain what's special and keep it in that that control, which is really inspiring and really exciting when you're working for a very large company that is uh, you know, that is following the current corporate, all of the same governance and things that are that are out there. And you have seen many, many companies along the way that are are kind of doing these same things. It it can be a little a little sad. But um I it does give me hope that the conversation is out there and that um maybe we can start a movement of getting more companies that focus on retaining that value.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Emily, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been great to just cover off all the topics um and get your perspective on what's going on in the content world for product people. Nice. It's been fun. The product experience hosts are me, Lily Smith, host by night and chief product officer by day. And me, Randy Silver, also host by night.

SPEAKER_00

And I spend my days working with product and leadership teams, helping their teams to do amazing work.

SPEAKER_01

Lou Ron Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.