What we learned at #mtpcon London 2025

#mtpcon London returned to the Barbican centre this year, and boy were we excited to be back. Dive into our key takeaways from product leaders like Ebi Atawodi, Matt LeMay, and Leah Tharin, alongside fresh perspectives from rising stars like Rebecca Mortimer, Nadine Matthews, and more!

First up on the main stage was Ebi Atawodi, YouTube's Director of Product. She walked us through a compelling playbook for crafting a product vision.

"There's nothing more magical than coming together as a group to envision something and then seeing it come to life," she said.

What are the keys to setting a good vision? She highlighted that it is supposed to question the status quo and get people excited but not overwhelmed.

Ebi highlighted the three parts to the playbook for coming up with a vision:

Some final thoughts from Ebi that resonated with us were:

Next up was Jose Quesada, VP Product, Mobile and Web, who walked us through the recent redesign of the Amex app, and strategies for increasing user engagement, satisfaction, and revenue.

Since inception, Jose explained how the app has been in continuous evolution, addressing different opportunities, such as a balanced focus on enterprise and customer needs, and global scalable app architecture.

"Amex's success stems from a never-ending search for growth and willingness to learn from failure," Jose said.

The recipe for success has a strong foundation from these three pillars:

One of the closing quotes from Jose that resonated with us was: “If your hypotheses don't hold, that's a sign you are pushing the boundaries with your thinking.” 

After a short break for several engagement activities, including Spotlight Sponsor sessions and great Q&As led by Lily Smith and Randy Silver, we were joined by Leah Tharin, a Product-led Growth Advisor, who led an actionable session all about Product Growth in 2025.

Leah spoke about why Growth is such an important concept to understand and, based on insights from dozens of B2B scale-up companies, what the future of product management in Tech looks like.

She explained how, because of AI, less capital is necessary to build the same amount of product, so there's a supply vs demand issue. Building cheaper means more competition. Things that are easy to build, are not defendable. So companies have to differentiate over their distribution. It is less about the product and more about how easy it is to try out your product.

Leah highlighted how product managers are in the prime spot to grow in the age of AI, because they're connected to all the right people in the company. For Growth, it could look like this…

And for that, you have to understand the entire business more than ever.

Following on from Leah was Aman Kahn, Director of Product at Arize AI, who led a great session on thriving with AI as a Product Manager.

Aman explained how there are Five Essential Skills to be successful as an AI Product Manager:

"Just remember, LLMs hallucinate. Your job as a PM is to make sure they don't embarrass you, your company or brand," he said, “You need to know where the technology is headed and how you can use it to address the problems you're trying to solve. Delight is a must-have. It drives impact. Delight is actionable.”

In the afternoon, Harry Stebbings, Founder and Podcast host of 20VC, spoke to Luke Harries from ElevenLabs, who spoke about following a Founder Led Product Engineer model. We learned about some of the secrets behind growing a startup like ElevenLabs.

Nesrine Changuel is a seasoned product manager who has worked at Google and Spotify and has led countless amazing talks over the years. This time was no different, as she taught us a lesson about the human connection when building great products. 

She shared studies from organizations such as Capgemini, Deloitte Digital, and Harvard Business Review that explored the impact of emotions and emotional connections on the success of products.

In general, those studies studied two groups of users:

When comparing those two categories, some interesting results emerged:

A key thing we learned was that "When you talk about emotion, there is no such thing as B2C vs. B2B; it's all B2H—business to human, as long as there is a user involved."

Internal products are very often overlooked at conferences, podcasts, or on blogs, so it was great that in the penultimate session for the day, Emily Tate, VP of Product at IVC Evidensia, helped us learn more about how to build internal products that actually drive value within a business. 

"When we talk about product and technology, it's easy to focus our attention on the flashy consumer products we all know and love. But there is so much technology powering our companies that no one ever sees," Emily opened with. "We pay a lot of attention to the pure tech companies, and analyse how they build their products. But there's a lot of product managers working on internal products."

How is internal product management different from other products? The Short Answer: IT'S NOT. The same product skills and techniques apply to B2C, B2B, and Internal products. The main difference is that your customer is a colleague.

She shared some key lessons that anyone in any product role should be honing in on, but especially in internal product management. 

Lesson 1

You don't own the metric: This is especially prevalent in companies undergoing digital transformation. “We can come in with an arrogant attitude that can work against us. This takes the trust of our stakeholders, and we won't be successful otherwise,” she noted. 

Lesson 2

Viability is your biggest risk, she explained: 

Lesson 3

Emily explained that users should be easy to access but it's not always simple. You may still have gatekeepers between product and your users. Be aware of your framing - you may have to work to convince people you are actually there to help.

Lesson 4

Storytelling and narrative are even more important. People don't understand why you need to change internal products. “Remember,” Emily highlighted, “Your biggest competitor is ‘good enough’ You can't assume people will be on board with an MVP. People are not on board with things that might make life harder in the short term.”

Closing out on the mainstage was Product Veteran Matt LeMay, who joined us to give us some harsh truths about the state of product.

Matt explained that the further we get away from thinking about impact, the more likely we are to revert to building stuff that feeds into the death spiral. He challenged us to always consider impact: "Does this still add up to the impact we seek to drive?"

“You need to focus your team on the work that matters most to the business. Even if nobody tells you to.”

“Having an impact-level goal makes prioritization more straightforward because it provides a clear measurement of impact. This makes prioritization frameworks such as ICE (Impact, Confidence, Effort) less useful. This is especially the case when one of the ideas you're trying to prioritize has a significantly higher impact than other choices.” he added. 

We learned that aligning product work with the success of the business brings us closer to the reality of work, and stops us from fighting losing battles.

This year we did a few things differently. For the first time ever, we ran a ProductTank stage that featured some great speakers, including Rebecca Mortimer, Senior Product Manager at BBC Maestro, Nadine Matthews, Product Manager at UK Hydrographic Office, Vincent Jong, CPO at Dealfront, and Jonathan Waldheim-Ross, Head of Service - Product and Delivery at NHS Education for Scotland, and Nacho Bassino, VP Product at dLocal. They had some great insights to share with the audience. Here are some of their key takeaways.

Nacho Bassino led a great session on the ProductTank stage, sharing his ROI playbook, which aims to empower teams with evidence-based information.

Nadine Matthews walked us through navigating difficult waters as a product manager. “It's important to talk about failures,” Nadine stated. She shared a story about dealing with challenges in her job at the UK Hydrographic Office. Her key learnings are to:

There are also some key principles to follow when dealing with sticky situations:

Jonathan Waldheim-Ross walked us through his public sector journey working in product management. From Jonathan, we learned that regardless of what role you have in the public sector, the mission stays the same.

He also stressed the importance of creating a digital transformation toolkit, and that opportunities are given and taken; "be proactive enough to take them," he said.

Rebecca Mortimer highlighted the importance of clarity, staying pragmatic and being confident (but adaptable). And finally, building from known facts.

Additionally, Vincent Jong’s talk was about boosting your product career with a CEO mindset. A key quote that stuck out for us was: "Developing a strong business sense is one of the most powerful ways for a Product Manager to stand out,"

To all who engaged with #mtpcon London from volunteers to attendees to speakers, thank you so much for joining us this year!

We hope you’ll take some time to reflect on what you learned. Share your learnings with your teams and talk about what you can put into practice. 

Be sure to look out for full write-ups and videos of all of our amazing keynote speakers on our blog in the coming weeks! Did you learn something that we missed? Let us know by emailing us at editor@mindtheproduct.com. Ta-ta for now!