In this episode, I speak with Simon Cross, Chief Product Officer - now Chief Product & Technology Officer (congrats, Simon!) - at Native Instruments, a company at the heart of global music production. Music lover Simon's journey spans broadcast engineering at Global Radio, product roles at the BBC, product leadership at Meta, and now, shaping the future of audio tools for creators worldwide. We cover a lot, including: What Native Instruments actually does: From DJ hardware to post-production...
Jul 20, 2025•55 min•Ep. 254
Benji Portwin has a CV stuffed with recognisable names, from Spotify to Monzo bank, alongside product leadership roles at accuRx and New Look. These days, he's running an agency dedicated to helping organisations learn how to design and build awesome products. Benji's hot take? Having been diagnosed with ADHD relatively recently, he's come to regard ADHD as somewhat of a superpower for product managers, and something that enables him and others to be more effective at their jobs rather than bein...
Jul 11, 2025•25 min•Season 1Ep. 253
Shobhit Chugh is a former Google PM who now helps product managers build their own brand, habits, confidence and career with Intentional Product Manager, and he also runs his own podcast of the same name. Shobhit's hot take? That too many product managers think that their work will speak for itself but, if they want to get ahead, they should start relentlessly promoting themselves; both inside and outside of the company they work for. Find Shobhit on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shobhit...
Jun 27, 2025•22 min•Season 1Ep. 252
Valeria Stromtsova is a Product Manager who traded fintech for sustainability and now works at Treeapp , helping plant trees where they're needed the most. Valeria's hot take? That product managers need to take the lead in creating a sustainable future, making sure they make a difference by considering the impact of their product decisions on their users, their stakeholders... and the planet we live on. Find Valeria on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lerastromtsova/ ....
Jun 22, 2025•23 min•Season 1Ep. 251
Welcome to CPO Stories! In this new "podcast within a podcast", I'll be speaking to executive product leaders from the UK's biggest companies as well as up-and-coming stars of the future. I'll be digging into how they approach product management within their organisations, how they approached the leap into executive product leadership and trying to get some deep insights into how they view product management practices and culture. If you're a CPO and would like to come on, drop me a line ! Or, f...
Jun 09, 2025•53 min•Season 1Ep. 250
Kanika Tolver is a Senior Product Manager by day and the founder of Career Rehab. She's also the author of a book of the same name, " Career Rehab: Rebuild Your Personal Brand and Rethink the Way You Work " Kanika's hot take? That some project managers out there are actually product managers in disguise. Their responsibilities have changed, their job titles have yet to catch up, and it's up to them to seize the opportunities of the new world of product management. Find Kanika on LinkedIn: https:...
Jun 02, 2025•24 min•Season 1Ep. 249
Welcome to CPO Stories! In this new "podcast within a podcast", I'll be speaking to executive product leaders from the UK's biggest companies as well as up-and-coming stars of the future. I'll be digging into how they approach product management within their organisations, how they approached the leap into executive product leadership and trying to get some deep insights into how they view product management practices and culture. If you're a CPO and would like to come on, drop me a line ! Or, f...
May 27, 2025•46 min•Season 1Ep. 248
Alex Rastatuev is a Senior Product Manager for Keyhole, a social media insights company, and is passionate about product-led growth. He's also an active mentor, looking to pay it forward to the next generation of PMs. Alex's hot take? That thoughtful product onboarding and education is more important than showing all your features all at the same time, and will lead to better activation rates and product growth. Find Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-rastatuev/ or check out his ...
May 23, 2025•22 min•Season 1Ep. 247
Welcome to CPO Stories! In this new "podcast within a podcast", I'll be speaking to executive product leaders from the UK's biggest companies as well as up-and-coming stars of the future. I'll be digging into how they approach product management within their organisations, how they approached the leap into executive product leadership and trying to get some deep insights into how they view product management practices and culture. If you're a CPO and would like to come on, drop me a line ! Or, f...
May 15, 2025•50 min•Season 1Ep. 246
Returning guest Rich Mironov is a B2B product management legend, long-time blogger and author of "The Art of Product Management". He's recently moved to Portugal to sample the best of European product culture, and is currently actively coaching and mentoring product leaders. His goal is to help them understand what business leaders really care about and ensure that they make an impact by speaking the same language as the rest of the executive suite. Episode highlights: 1. No one in the leadershi...
May 08, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 245
Tami Reiss (aka "Tami from Miami"!) is an executive leadership coach, corporate trainer and upcoming author of a children's product management book. Tami's hot take? That all product managers are leaders, even if they don't feel like it. As a PM, whatever your situation (and however high or low your sights) it's your job to inspire the team and influence your colleagues. Find Tami on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamireiss/ or check out https://tamireiss.com/ . If you'd like to appear on...
Apr 29, 2025•23 min•Season 1Ep. 244
Alexandar Murauski is an expert in all things related to product localisation and the CEO of Alconost, a platform that aims to help product teams unlock global growth through AI-enhanced localisation. Alexander's hot take? That the language your product "speaks" is a fundamental part of the product's user experience, and is often left lacking. It's important to consider localisation upfront, and ensure that you take cultural considerations into account, not just Google Translate the text as an a...
Apr 18, 2025•27 min•Season 1Ep. 243
Andriy Burkov is a renowned machine learning expert and leader. He's also the author of (so far) three books on machine learning, including the recently-released "The Hundred-Page Language Models Book", which takes curious people from the very basics of language models all the way up to building their own LLM. Andriy is also a formidable online presence and is never afraid to call BS on over-the-top claims about AI capabilities via his punchy social media posts. Episode highlights: 1. Large Lang...
Apr 08, 2025•1 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 242
Sam Greenwood is an emotional resilience coach who works with product managers to help them survive at the intersection of emotional stress and product leadership. His goal is to help product managers build EQ, communication and leadership and AI-proof their careers. Sam's hot take? That we are on the cusp of societal collapse and product managers, as well as people in tech in general, have taken their eye off the ball. Product people need to adopt new mindsets and build different kinds of produ...
Apr 01, 2025•23 min•Season 1Ep. 241
Olha Yohansen-Veselova is a product growth and product optimisation expert who has now gone solo and is helping companies with their onboarding. Olha is also a startup mentor and advisor, and is passionate about product managers living up to their full potential. Olha's hot take? That product managers need to beyond being facilitators and unblockers, and move towards being true growth partners to the business. Too many people are working in a bubble and not taking account of the commercial impac...
Mar 24, 2025•25 min•Season 1Ep. 240
About the Episode Elena Verna is a renowned growth consultant who has worked at and with a glittering array of well-known tech companies. She's a strong advocate of career optionality and solopreneurship, as well as the author of a popular growth newsletter, Reforge instructor and popular LinkedIn content creator with her insightful posts and searing memes. Just don't call her an influencer. Episode highlights: 1. Solopreneurship is about having optionality; it doesn't mean you never take a full...
Mar 03, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 239
Zoe Laycock is the Product Marketing Lead for Diffblue, an AI-powered testing platform, and is passionate about promoting and elevating the role of product marketing, as well as advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the tech sector. Zoe's hot take? That product people need to get serious about ethical AI, and put people, processes and protections in place to ensure that AI products create the impact that we all want to see in the world. Find Zoe: ...on LinkedIn: https://www.li...
Feb 24, 2025•30 min•Season 1Ep. 238
Myles Sutholt is a Germany-based product leader working for an Africa-based startup where he's helping to digitise the health supply chain across the continent, with a "laser focus" on creating user value alongside business value and fostering motivated, dynamic teams. His hot take? That leaders too often rely on gut feel and recency bias when performing performance reviews, relying on point-in-time assessments and trying to be nice rather than supporting the career growth of their teams. Find M...
Feb 11, 2025•20 min•Season 1Ep. 237
Martin Eriksson is the co-founder of Mind the Product, and co-author of the "Product Leadership" book. Martin has worked with a multitude of companies and has been heavily involved in the VC side of product management. These days, he's advising and coaching companies as well as trying to help us all make good decisions by writing a new book, "The Decision Stack", alongside its supporting website. Episode highlights: 1. The vast majority of company employees don't know what their company strategy...
Feb 02, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 236
Martijn Versteeg is the founder of Group Effort, an organisation that fosters connections & facilitates the growth of scale-up leaders through peer groups, offsites and workshops. His hot take? That product people should stop looking for the "golden nugget" of knowledge. Martijn argues that instead of seeking a single breakthrough insight, product managers should focus on consistent iteration and learning through small, incremental steps. Find Martijn on LinkedIn or check out Group Effort . ...
Jan 26, 2025•23 min•Season 1Ep. 235
Martijn Moret is the founder of DataSquirrel.ai , a company focused on leveraging AI to humanise and simplify data analysis for product managers and non-tech managers. His hot take? Most product managers neglect data—not because they dislike it, but due to a lack of time and skills, which can lead to wrong priorities and poor decision-making. He also highlights the current limitations of AI in data analysis, emphasising that while AI accelerates workflows, it still requires human oversight for r...
Jan 10, 2025•22 min•Season 1Ep. 234
🎄 Deck the Halls with Go-To-Market! 🎄 I spoke with Maja Voje for a convivial Christmas chat about all things product and growth. We discussed: 2024 Retrospectives and 2025 Predictions Product Management and Go-To-Market Strategies AI in Workflows and Whether Product Management is Dead 💀 LinkedIn Growth Strategies Balancing Opportunities and When To Say No Networking and Community Building This is the audio of that conversation, but you can see us both (complete with Christmas hats!) on YouTub...
Dec 23, 2024•59 min•Season 1Ep. 233
Adam Dille is the SVP of Product Engineering at Quantum Metric , a company specialising in experience analytics for some of the world's biggest brands. Despite his engineering roots, Adam's relentless curiosity about the WHY behind building products led him to embrace product thinking and how to build products better. His hot take? The traditional product trio - PM, design, and engineering - isn't enough anymore. He advocates for transforming the trio into a square by adding a customer-facing, "...
Dec 17, 2024•22 min•Season 1Ep. 232
Grace Yusuff is a London-based "reluctant product manager" and introvert who thought she could never do the job. She has since fallen in love with the role and now works as a product manager and early-career mentor, helping others get into tech. Her hot take? That introversion is a superpower for product managers and something to be embraced rather than overcome. She is a strong advocate for people to find their own way in product management, and not having to live up to clichés or stereotypes. ...
Dec 09, 2024•24 min•Season 1Ep. 231
Assaph Mehr is an Australia-based product & people leader as well as a published fantasy author, who also uses his writing chops to produce a newsletter, "Rise of the Product Leader". His hot take? That LLMs and other generative AI tools are the equivalent of an angle grinder. For those who don't know, angle grinders have big, spinning metal discs that make them ideal tools for certain use cases (like cutting up concrete) but are terrible for anything else. Assaph believes that LLMs have a l...
Dec 01, 2024•21 min•Season 1Ep. 230
Matt Maier is a product marketer and AI enthusiast from Irvine, California, with a background spanning the Air Force, aerospace, healthcare, and startup consulting. His hot take? Within 5 years, employment as we know it will sharply decline. Matt predicts that advancements in AI will render traditional employee-employer relationships obsolete, because why would companies hire people to do easily automatable tasks? On the other hand, Matt believes this is a good thing and will enable an entirely ...
Nov 25, 2024•22 min•Season 1Ep. 229
Yael Mark is a behavioural scientist turned product manager, who is passionate about helping others unlock the power of user-centred product design by embracing behavioural science. She believes that understanding human behaviour and cognitive biases can drive better product decisions and stakeholder alignment, as well as make sure we do it ethically. Episode highlights: 1. Behavioural science helps product managers design for real-world users Behavioural science is the study of how people think...
Nov 18, 2024•53 min•Season 1Ep. 228
Returning guest Eisha Armstrong is the co-founder of Vecteris and author of books like "Productize" and "Fearless", which talk about that tricky journey from a professional services to product organisation. She's back to talk about her latest book, "Commercialize", which gives us the skinny on how to monetise, sell, and market productised offerings in transforming B2B professional services firms. Episode highlights: 1. Product strategy is the heart of successful commercialisation A successful pr...
Nov 10, 2024•52 min•Season 1Ep. 227
Andy Budd is a designer-turned-venture partner who founded one of the UK's first UX agencies before pivoting to help early-stage startup founders make good product decisions and get to product/market fit. He's recently released "The Growth Equation", a book that distils some of the common themes he sees across early-stage companies and aims to give them the best chance of success. We spoke all about the themes from the book, as well as where product management fits into the early-stage equation....
Nov 02, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 226
Jas Shah is a fintech product consultant based in London who helps small startups and management services organizations build winning products, whilst keeping his pulse on the fintech scene. His hot take? That product management is one of the least glamorous functions in an organisation. It's often portrayed as a sexy role where you're the "CEO of the product" with autonomy and responsibility, but for most product managers, the role is arduous and grating, involving invisible work like coordinat...
Oct 27, 2024•18 min•Season 1Ep. 225
