This week on The Product Experience, we revisit a great conversation with Todd Green, now President of King – the studio behind Candy Crush. Todd shares how he thinks about building products that are not only globally successful but enduringly fun.

Todd takes us behind the curtain on what it really takes to build for mass audiences, create fun at scale, and grow empowered product teams.

Key takeaways

• Fun can’t be optimised: Building successful games (or products) requires capturing something visceral. Metrics help, but “fun” starts as a feeling, not a number.
• Audience motivation matters more than demographics: Instead of targeting by age or gender, King focuses on why people play – whether it’s for calm, connection or challenge.
• Legacy products need product management too: The real work starts when a product survives beyond launch. King invests heavily in balancing new features with legacy complexity.
• Good product leaders own the business: At King, product leads (executive producers) are responsible for P&L – it's a full-stack role across delivery, team, and outcomes.
• Sharing insights is a team sport: King has full-time roles and informal networks dedicated to transferring learning between game teams.
• Ethical responsibility is core: King prioritises player wellbeing and long-term satisfaction – not just engagement – as a business principle.
• Building great managers is a product in itself: Todd sees first-line manager development as one of his top priorities for sustaining culture and performance.

Key chapters

• 00:00 – Intro and Todd’s promotion
• 01:40 – Todd’s media roots and time at Fremantle
• 06:15 – Digital bibles and global format sharing
• 10:50 – Lessons from the Susan Boyle YouTube moment
• 13:40 – Shifting to King and the discovery of fun
• 18:30 – Motivations beyond boredom
• 22:45 – Building for a massive, diverse audience
• 26:40 – The product structure at King
• 30:10 – Keeping Candy Crush fresh after years at the top
• 35:05 – When to launch a new game
• 38:50 – Ethics and responsibility in game design
• 42:20 – Why qual and quant both matter
• 45:10 – How King shares knowledge across teams
• 48:00 – The hiring landscape and talent challenges
• 51:00 – Growing new managers and inclusive leadership
• 54:10 – Closing thoughts and Todd’s reflections

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.

AI has changed the way developers work—and Stack Overflow is right at the centre of that shift. In this episode, Jody Bailey, CPTO at Stack Overflow, shares how the platform is adapting to AI, protecting its community, and embracing new revenue streams. We explore how LLMs are reshaping developer behaviour, why canonical answers still matter, and what it takes to keep trust, quality and community alive in the age of instant AI-generated code. If you’re working on dev tools, building with AI, or just wondering how to keep your product relevant through disruption, this one’s for you.

Key takeaways

• AI is both a disruptor and an enabler
• Engagement is shifting, not disappearing
• Community remains the core asset
• AI doesn't kill quality—it challenges it
• Prompt engineering is the new entry-level skill
• Innovation is iterative—even with AI
• Stack is designing for tomorrow’s engineers
• Jody’s vision is long term

Chapters
00:00 – intro to Jody Bailey and his role at Stack Overflow
03:30 – impact of AI and shift in how developers search for answers
07:45 – Stack’s new business model: licensing data to LLMs
10:15 – protecting community-contributed data and enforcing attribution
13:20 – changing nature of search and the role of AI
17:00 – trust, verification, and the evolving user experience
21:10 – internal AI experiments and lessons learned
25:00 – balancing community, learning, and AI-powered answers
28:20 – new skills required for developers in an AI world
31:40 – evolving engineering roles and the future of team structures
36:10 – making Stack Overflow accessible for the next generation
39:50 – what Jody’s most excited about for the future

Featured Links: Follow Jody on LinkedIn | Stack Overflow | ‘Yes, Artificial Intelligence Has A Creative Side, Sort Of’ feature at Forbes

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.

Intercom’s CPO Paul Adams joins The Product Experience to talk about how the company has radically transformed its approach in the wake of AI's acceleration. From ripping up roadmaps and reorganising teams to reinventing pricing models, Paul shares what it really takes to adapt—fast.

Key takeaways

• "You’re not selling users anymore. You’re selling work."
• AI has shifted Intercom’s business model from seat-based to outcome-based pricing—charging per resolution, not per person.
• "We ripped up our strategy five days after ChatGPT launched."
• Intercom made a bold, immediate pivot to reorient its product and vision around AI, including launching a new website and scrapping existing roadmaps.
• "The only thing that’s persisted is our principles."
• While teams, triads and structures were dismantled, Intercom kept its core product principles intact—like 'start with the problem'.
• "This isn’t evolution—it’s a new species of company."
• Intercom now compares itself to AI-native startups, not its former self. It has rebuilt the product team into flexible, role-fluid workstreams.
• "People have left because it’s not for them."
• The pace of change has human costs. Leadership must communicate directly and honestly to support people through radical transformation.
• "I worry I’ll be left behind too."
• Even senior leaders are actively relearning—Paul admits to using tools like Replit and Lovable to stay current with AI-native UX trends.

Chapters

• 00:00 – Opening thoughts: fear of being left behind in the AI era
• 00:18 – Introduction to the episode and Paul Adams
• 01:00 – Paul’s journey from Google and Facebook to Intercom
• 01:51 – What it’s like to witness Intercom evolve over 11+ years
• 02:22 – The energy and disruption brought on by AI
• 03:17 – From seat-based to value-based pricing: the big shift
• 05:06 – Why AI made Intercom rethink everything, fast
• 07:58 – Sales team challenges: retraining to sell a new model
• 09:43 – The business impact: Fin’s rapid growth and dual-model tension
• 11:02 – What it means to “sell work” instead of licences
• 12:58 – New kinds of jobs emerging around AI tooling
• 14:45 – Ripping up process: how Intercom builds products now
• 16:00 – Competing with AI-native startups, not legacy Intercom
• 17:49 – The one thing that stayed: Intercom’s product principles
• 18:54 – Why starting with the probl

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.