A significant number of AI initiatives are consuming budget and executive attention, while failing to reach production or deliver measurable value. Episode 12 of Talking Product helps you pressure-test your organisation's AI spend today.

In this episode, Collin and I use a Financial Times article as a springboard for a conversation about the state of AI initiatives in large organisations. The article—"AI's awfully exciting until companies want to use it"—captures a familiar pattern in technology: high expectations, significant investment, but limited impact. The article is freely available with FT registration.

In this episode, we explore three themes:

• Why pilots aren't scaling (often it's your data, not the technology)
• Whether organisations are bringing experimental rigour to AI adoption, or just buying impressive demos
• The leadership knowledge gap—understanding not just what AI can do, but what it can't

What you'll get:

• Questions that will help reveal whether your organisation is truly learning from its AI experiments or just spending
• Insight into why data governance problems you've been kicking down the road are now becoming existential
• What Gartner found about hidden costs in AI initiatives—and questions to ask to bring them out into the open
• Practical guidance on what experimental rigour actually looks like in an AI context

#AI #DigitalTransformation #Leadership #ProductManagement

In this episode, Collin shares a case about a leadership team building a hardware and software product.

We dig into this case because it highlights familiar product dynamics—great, passionate people, working to tight deadlines, but stuck in semi-siloed patterns and not really operating as one team. Each group pushes its own goals but isn’t fully aligned on the end game. And when the product leaders aren’t working effectively as a team, it has a real impact on outcomes and the ability to deliver at pace.

We chose this topic to give product leaders footholds and practical ideas for starting similar conversations in your own organisation. We often call ourselves a team—but are we, as product leaders, really operating as a team? What do we really mean when we use the word “team”?

In this session, Collin describes how he asked the leadership group that he was working with this simple, but powerful question: “Are you working as a team?” To their credit, they took the time to work with Collin and reflect on this question, as a collective.

One area of the case that I found interesting was when Collin unpacks the complexity of “owning” requirements as new information emerges or thinking shifts about a particular problem. It is this inherent complexity of digital product development that makes siloed, and even semi-siloed, ways of working so dangerous.

Collin also highlights a deeper systemic issue: senior and executive leaders often don’t grasp the importance of ways of working in digital product development. Instead, they simply push the silos to deliver faster. I personally feel that this level of naivety at the top is a serious competitive problem.

I hope you find this case useful. We welcome recommendations and comments—and we’re looking forward to getting a few more episodes out, sooner rather than later.

At the end of the podcast, I refer to the work of Nonaka & Takeuchi and said I would include a link: 1) The New New Product Development Game and 2) The Knowledge Creating Company are probably their most well known work. But there is a wealth of other material that is also worth exploring.

In Episode 10, Collin and I dive into a question I was asked during an interview:

“We do an offsite with our leadership team, and it’s a great couple of days… but once we’re back in the day-to-day, it all sort of disappears. As a coach, how do you help with that?”

The question has lingered with me for quite some time, and I thought it would be an interesting topic to unpack with Collin.

In this episode, we explore:

• How coaches can help “hold” a team’s desire to change, providing structure and accountability without getting pulled into the daily fires
• Why working with digital leadership teams means going beyond agile frameworks into the messier world of team dynamics and organizational complexity
• The importance of examining your own unconscious beliefs about leadership
• Three common offsite mistakes we often see—and how to avoid them:
  • Senior leaders facilitating instead of participating
  • Agendas so full there’s no space for reflection
  • Avoiding the hard conversations that matter most

We share personal experiences to keep the conversation actionable and grounded in the day-to-day realities of organisational life.

I hope you find Episode 10 useful.

Thanks to everyone who’s been following the podcast and leaving kind reviews—it means a lot.