Product Agility

Bruce McCarthy: Connecting the Dots: Product Leadership & Managing Uncertainty - Productized 2025 TalkInTen

• Ben Maynard, Barbara Fazeka, Bruce McCarthy

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Live from Productized Lisbon - a world-class conference for product people.


Productized is one of the best product conferences in Europe: thoughtfully run, intensely practical and full of senior product leaders sharing real-world tactics. We're honoured to partner with Productized in Lisbon, it's an exceptional event for learning, connecting and rethinking how product leaders shape outcomes.

This short episode features a live conversation about the strategic role of product leadership, how CPOs should connect functions across the company, and practical steps to manage uncertainty and align stakeholders.

Key topics discussed

  • Why the CPO is the organisation's connector and strategic coach
  • How to translate vision into coherent strategy and staged bets
  • Practical tactics to align product, sales, marketing and engineering
  • Using tailored tools to improve internal communication and stakeholder prep
  • Lessons learned from product failure and the importance of early, frequent communication


Chapters
[00:01:03] - Co-hosted firsts: What it means to run a co-hosted Talking 10 and set the tone for candid chats.
[00:01:37] - CPO as connector: Why the Chief Product Officer must connect functions, strategy and customer outcomes.
[00:07:53] - AI & internal comms: Practical ways to prepare stakeholder conversations and tailor messaging for impact.
[00:09:41] - Scary lessons and recovery: Real stories of product failure, alignment mistakes, and how to communicate earlier.

Guest bios:

Bruce McCarthy — Product leader, speaker and workshop facilitator focused on product leadership, strategy and cross-functional alignment. Bruce helps executives turn vision into staged strategic bets and coaches product teams to lead across organisations.


Tamas — Co-founder of Bobcats Coding, a Lisbon and Budapest-based digital product studio that specialises in AI engineering and end-to-end product development. Bobcats builds practical tools and publishes educational guides to help product teams adopt new tech responsibly.

Thanks to our sponsor: Bobcats Coding — visit bobcatscoding.com to download their AI economics guidebook and learn more about their work in di

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Product Agility Podcast

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Welcome to the Product Agility Podcast where we explore the ever changing world of product leadership and org design, helping you navigate complexity and build better outcomes for your people and your customers. This week we're coming to you live from Lisbon for the third year in a row at the Productize conference where I'm grabbing 10 minute conversations with product thinkers, leaders and innovators from around the world. These quick fire chats are all about what's shaping our industry right now, from AI and product strategy to the human side of building great products. Now a huge thank you goes out to Bobcatz Coding for making this Lisbon series possible. Bobcats is a Budapest and Lisbon based digital product studio specializing in AI engineering and end to end digital product development. They're also on a mission to educate the market, exploring a new topic every six months and this fall is no exception. Their latest AI economics guidebook is out now and you can download it for free@bobcatscoding.com now here's your talking 10 productized 2025. We are here with Bruce McCarthy of the CPA Studio. Reading your T shirt there. Yeah. Emblazoned like my T shirt. Yep, but with different words, similar color. And we're here with Tamash from cto. Not cto. Co. Founder. Co founder. Yes. Mind blank Co founder of Bobcats. This is the first co hosted episode of a talk in 10 that we've ever done. So it's a big day. Fun. Yes. Bruce, you're the guinea pig. I like that role. I will give you feedback after. I think you make a great guinea pig. No, different conversation. We are here to talk about not. Only do you have a workshop, but you also have a talk here at Productized. And I think from what you were saying before, you're here to connect the dots. So would you mind telling our listeners a little bit about what you're doing here at Productized? Yeah. So I'm going to be talking about product as a leadership role and in my main stage talk, I'm going to talk about the leadership role that the CPO needs to take in an organization where they're connecting the dots between all the different functions so that we can have a coherent offering for the customer. They're also connecting the dots between what we're building for the customer and what effect that should have on the business in terms of every ARR, in terms of margin, in terms of growth and new logos and so on. And they've also got to connect all of that to of course, what the product team is building. So this role of connecting the dots is so important for the CPO in particular to play for two reasons. One is things change. My talk says you've got to manage through uncertainty. Right? And one of the things that happens throughout the year is there's innovation in the marketplace, there's competitive moves, there's sales opportunities you didn't see coming. You've got to be able to adapt to those uncertainties. And it's hard to pivot a rigid roadmap. It's even harder to pivot a sales team where the comp plan is already fixed for the year. Right. Or the marketing team that's already planning the banners for the conference in six months where you're going to supposedly announce the new thing. So you've got to be the captain of that ship and manage that uncertainty not just with the product team, but across the whole organization. And this is in the role of a cpo? That's right. And you might say, well, didn't I just describe the role of a CEO? But in fact, CEOs are much busier than that. They are spending time with investors, with the board, with large customers, and a bunch of administrative crap. And what I see with CEO after CEO is they need a number two who is a neutral party, who is not part of engineering or part of marketing or part of sales, but who can be the coach, referee, facilitator, therapist if necessary among those parties. So then how do you tell when a CPO and the product team exploring uncertainty or whether they're just kind of floundering in ambiguity? Yeah, well, there's got to be a vision. There's got to be a shared vision of where are we going? And then the tactics can vary, right? The tactics can be reactive or opportunistic, as long as they're all on track toward that vision and as long as the overall strategy is understood. This is one of the core tools in the CPO's toolbox, is being the person who adopts the vision, probably from an original founder, articulates it clearly so the CEO doesn't have to be in every meeting reminding everyone, and then maps out the strategy for achieving it step by step. Companies like Tesla with their secret master plan, like Netflix with Gibbs Gle model, where they say, all right, these are the big steps we're going to take, the big bets we're going to make in the order we're going to make them, because each one unlocks the next. That's the essence of strategy and what the CPO should be articulating. Have you found that product people maybe not CPOs so much, I think, well, maybe some, but maybe more that the team surrounding them are afraid to take on that extra responsibility of connecting the dots because they don't want their performance to be tied to the performance of others, which maybe they feel aren't as competent. That's fair. And I think that a lot of functions feel that way. The marketing team will say, well look, we made our goal of generating enough MQLs and the sales team is obviously coin operated. But if every department does their job and only their job and meets their metrics and only their metrics, it doesn't necessarily add up to success for the company. Somebody needs to not just operate individual cogs in the system, but make sure the flywheel actually is going and accelerating. That's the job of the CEO, is to be the owner of that flywheel. Now, as you say, that's a hard job and maybe people should shy away from it. But if not product, then who? Would you want the CTO to be trying to drive cross functional alignment with sales? Would you want the head of sales to be trying to dictate the roadmap to product? No, none of those things would be true. But the product leadership is the most strategic role in the company short of the CEO. They're the ones who got the skills and they're often perceived as neutral, so they don't have an agenda. They're not trying to build a sales empire or an engineering empire, so they're the best fit for the job. There's one more point. If our job is just write requirements and feed them to engineering, that feels like an admin job, right? There are product managers who just only wear that hat and try to keep their heads down. But that's not a career strategy you've got to influence if you want to get promoted, if you want to, if you want to honestly stay employed in this business long term. I guess all this is about communication, right? And yesterday you mentioned for certain tasks you use AI. Would you use AI for internal communication? And if yes, how? If not, why not? That's a great idea. So custom GPTs are super helpful. You could feed ChatGPT a bunch of transcripts of meetings with your stakeholders and ask it to kind of profile the thinking style and the communication style of each of your stakeholders so that you can prep for discussions with them and speak their language so that you can remind yourself, especially if you haven't spoken in a little while, of what's on their mind. That would be a really good use case. You could even get it to critique something you're proposing to say or an email you're planning to send to a certain person and say, how would this person, with all this evidence I've provided you of their personality, react to this email and have it tear it apart for you? Well, annoyingly, our time is coming to an end. Nearly, I think. No, I want a whole other slot. Is that okay? I would like that because I've got a lot of questions to ask, actually. A lot. So many questions to ask. The things you raise are really pertinent and I think it's challenges I've seen quite a lot over the last few years and it's. How do you feel that connecting the dots activity in a role if you haven't got the people available? And I think people sticking head above the parapet and putting themselves forward saying, do you know what, this may be a really uncomfortable thing to do, but I am going to tie the success of what I personally, what I'm doing to other people and I think that's a very scary thing for people to do. As a closing thought, given your talk and your workshop, what is the, what's the scariest thing you've had to overcome to get to where you are today? That's a tough one. So I've had some scary moments. Like when the first product I product managed completely, utterly failed because of lack of alignment with other departments. I thought I was going to get fired for that. Luckily that didn't happen. I had a moment where I was in charge of the beta program for our main product. No, for a brand new product. And I hadn't done enough understanding of what the expectations were. Me and my engineering team were happy with my plan to get 5 beta customers. The CEO just went off on me and said, 5? How about 25? How about 50? And this was in front of the entire executive team and I'm told that I turned bright red. That was scary. You don't want to be in either of those situations. Right. And the way to do that is to communicate early and often about your plans. Not when you've got them, but when you're formulating them and get people's input on it. And that's what the workshop is all about, is the key skills of a product leader in getting your stakeholders lined up early. Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on, Bruce. And thank you, Tamash. You'll be here again on another episode soon representing Bobcats, which is fantastic. So thank you very much for listening. Bruce. Thank you for coming on, Tamash. Thank you again. And we'll be back again very soon with another talking 10.



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Ben Maynard

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