Product Agility

Pippa Topp: Pockets of Brilliance: Small Behaviours, Big Product Impact - Productized 2025 TalkInTen

• Saloni Seth-Watkins, Pippa Topp, Ryan Lane

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We’re thrilled to be back at the exceptional Productized conference in Lisbon, Portugal — a world-class gathering for product thinkers, practitioners and leaders. It’s an honour to partner with Productized again and bring you a special series of ten-minute conversations recorded onsite. A huge thank you to Bobcats Coding for making this Lisbon run possible.

In this bite-sized episode, we speak with Pippa Top about her talk "Pockets of Brilliance" — how small, value-led behaviours create outsized product impact no matter the context.

Key topics discussed

  • What “Pockets of Brilliance” means and why it matters for everyday product teams
  • Practical values to guide behaviour: Curiosity, Creativity, Learning, Collaboration
  • How to align personal goals with business context
  • Prioritising impact over shiny capabilities (including AI)
  • Small experiments and culture change that scale

Guest bio:

Pippa Topp is a CPO and coach focused on helping product people and teams grow through practical behaviours and emotionally intelligent leadership. She works with organisations to build sustainable product practice by aligning values, capability growth and measurable impact.


We’re proud to partner with the brilliant Productized conference — it’s consistently one of the best product events in Europe for practical, human-centred thinking. Thank you to our sponsor Bobcats Coding for supporting this Lisbon series — check out their AI economics guidebook at bobcatscoding.com.

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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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. Hello and welcome back to day three of the 10th anniversary of the Productize Conference here in beautiful Lisboa. This is the Product Agility Podcast and I am salonie Seth Watkins. I am not Ben Maynard, as you've probably noticed, but hey, I'm so much better than him, aren't I? So anyway, I am again joined by the rather lovely Ryan Lane, who is a CTO of Bobcat Coding. I've got it right this time. I'm not trying to open some random companies for you. And we are with the rather wonderful Pippa Top, who's a CPO and coach, and she will be telling us what's really funny. I had down this rather long, quite boring title for her talk and she's just corrected me to tell me it was called Pockets of Brilliance. Now what a fabulous name of a talk. Please, please, please tell us about it. It sounds wonderful. Well, firstly, hello. Thank you for having me. Pockets of Brilliance is about recognizing that whatever context we find ourselves in, whatever business, which most likely won't be a unicorn startup, we can still do really good product work. And that product work or those pockets, those pockets of brilliance are made up of behaviors that are guided by a set of values, always looking at how we can explore and learn more with a growth mindset of the capabilities that there are in product, and also using emotional intelligence to build our relationships with other people and applying all those things within the context we find ourselves in. So I suppose the driver for it really came from, especially in my coaching, seeing people who seemed a bit broken by the expectations of what product managers should be having read books and coming away going, oh, God, I don't do that. Am I even. Can I even call myself a product manager? And I wanted to encourage people that actually, wherever we are, we can always do something. We've always got a level of agency that allows us to continue growing. So that's where it came from and that's what it's about. I love that message because I think you're right. Especially when people start their careers, they have this sort of bulleted sort of job description and it's sort of devoid of any kind of emotion or fun. And I remember, you know, if people used to laugh in their jobs, sometimes people say, oh, that you're being a bit frivolous. Like you can't have fun and be and be a professional at the same time. So I'm loving this sort of message that you're giving, which is sort of bring. Bring that to your job. I guess that's what I'm hearing about this sort of pockets of brilliance. Yeah, it's, it's that and also not sort of taking the pressure off that you don't have to do all the things all the time, all at once. Because there are so many things to do. Like if we just take the AI tools that are emerging now, it's moving so rapidly, how can any one person expect to be across all of it all the time, as well as develop in other areas of their sort of customer discovery? For example, how are you learning that at the same time as learning all the AI tools? And maybe you're also trying to learn how to be a better communicator. All these things are part of our role and yet we seem to talk about it as if we've already mastered them all. Whereas actually, no, most people, especially who are coming to conferences and wanting to take part in the community, are on a journey, I'm sorry to use that word, a journey of growth, of learning. And we want to encourage that learning, not put people off by saying, oh, well, we should be doing it one way or another. So I've come, I've listened to your talk and I'm all inspired. Where do I start? Like, where practically, I think, right, I've got it now. I'm going to go back to my job and I, like, take a deep breath. Where do I start to sort of move into this? I suppose it always starts. And this is where sort of coaching comes in for me is identify, identifying. Where are you trying to go personally? So what, what are your goals, but also where is the business you're in trying to go and aligning those so recognizing that context you're in. So what's appropriate for me to focus on right now and identifying which capability you want to start developing and then once you've understood that, it's really looking at your own behaviours. And this is where I talk about values. So I talk about four particular curiosity, creativity, learning and collaboration. And starting to recognize what behaviors are you doing that if I were to sit and just watch you for a day, would I say, oh, they're a really collaborative person or I can see they're demonstrating curiosity by the way they talk to their stakeholders or talk to the customers. So really practically it's about identifying a goal and then seeing how your behaviour is getting you towards that goal. Ryan. I really appreciated what you said about this sort of illusion of omnipotence in the industry where the idea is that everyone is leading these massive divisions with infinite resources and every capability already fleshed out either within their own person or in their team. Do you see a need or have any suggestions for people to like, reverse engineer from this cloud of, you know, let's call them like product complete capabilities that better match where they are in their own career and what businesses they're engaged in. Like how, in addition to looking at their own behavior and the way that they interface with their job, how do they start to navigate this map when everyone's assuming that, okay, we have it under control? Okay, that's a big question, right? If we step out for a second and think around that end goal piece. So if we think about it personally, we're on a personal development progression that is taking us to our personal goals. And a business hopefully has a strategy that is taking them towards the their vision. Understanding that first of all, in coaching we talk about that goal and then recognizing the reality that you're actually in and calling it out and then being able to say, okay, well what are the options? Because that will immediately limit what you can and can't do. There's no point in an organization talking about all the shiny AI bells and whistles if they can't actually measure the basics of in their product. So it's ultimately sort of stepping back and going, okay, well what are the constraints we have and where can we start? And then that's going to limit you first of all to what you can do. And then where should we start? Then becomes okay, well, in the same way we would develop our products, we're prioritizing based on impact. So what's going to have the biggest impact? So a story I tell in the talk is around how a product manager who is in my team, a good friend of mine called Kate, she came in and there were no data analytics. It was a B2B platform. She was given a list of backlog features from the sales team. And actually her starting point was, hang on a second, I'm going to be more curious. I'm going to ask some more questions. I'm going to go and talk to customers, I'm going to talk to the account managers. I'm going to understand a bit more about what's actually going on. And then she took that learning approach to what can I do? And using creativity to go, oh, okay, well, maybe I can find out who's logging in. And then it transpired that people weren't logging in, not because they didn't want to use it, but because they'd lost their passwords. There wasn't a password reset button. Really basic stuff, right? So starting with that, the first thing of what's going to make the biggest impact and taking these small steps toward it. I don't think there's one right answer. But it's that process and the mindset that really helps people and teams and then companies flourish. Because when I talk about pockets of brilliance, it's not just about one person doing something. It's about how you start working with others and that starts to radiate and inspire other people. And then you start to see the shift in the culture and then, you know, it grows out and out and out and. Yeah, that's what I'm hoping to share anyway. I love it. I love the message. And it is. It's simple and it starts like everyone feels they can do something. I think that's what's really nice about it. It's very empowering. It's a lovely message. Thank you very much. That was really insightful. And again, there'll be some information in the show, notes on anything we want to share. I'd like to thank you for your time and thank you for your time as well, Ryan. And we'll have some more talks at 10 later. Thank you very much. Thank you.

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Ben Maynard

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