Gaming taught brutal user honesty

Laura Teclemariam has had one of the most varied careers in product — from mobile gaming economies at EA to building Netflix's animation studio from the ground up, to owning LinkedIn's core identity products. In this episode, she joins Lily and Randy to trace the through-line of her "jungle gym" path, unpack what gaming taught her about retention, why entertainment sharpens your product instincts in ways big tech can't, and how she's now teaching the next generation of PMs at UC Berkeley — with AI at the centre of everything.

Chapters
00:00 — Intro: The feedback you didn't see coming at LinkedIn
02:00 — Laura's background: engineer, founder, consultant, PM
03:50 — Why a nonlinear career is more coherent than it looks
06:00 — Gaming as the most honest product environment
07:20 — Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, mods, and retention crisis
09:00 — How gaming metrics (DAU, retention) predicted big tech's future
12:10 — Data ends debates in tech; taste ends them in entertainment
13:05 — Netflix Animation: building a studio's product function from scratch
15:15 — Storyboards as prototypes, animatics as MVPs
19:40 — Tool consolidation: going from 400 to 130 tools across productions
22:05 — Build vs. buy decisions when the budget is a feature film
26:40 — What it takes to hire PMs for entertainment vs. general tech
28:20 — STAR interviews and evaluating stakeholder chops
29:20 — Why LinkedIn came next: curiosity about social network retention
31:50 — The weight of building for 1B+ users and LinkedIn's trust-first culture
35:50 — Profile, Messaging, Groups: LinkedIn's original value proposition
37:00 — Teaching advanced product management at UC Berkeley
38:10 — The course thesis: AI for everything, and the "great convergence"
42:00 — Does the PM/design/engineering triad collapse with AI?
45:30 — What Laura's students taught her about curiosity and safe-to-fail environments

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.