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.