ProductTank London - Product Leadership: Lessons from proven leaders

Our first ProductTank in 2025 tackles the topic voted most-interesting by our community: Product Leadership. Learn lessons from proven leaders in Product Management on what it takes to reach the highest levels of leadership, what leading Product teams entails—including what’s rewarding about it, and some of the challenges you might not expect.

Our speakers:

Sonia Araujo - Product Director @ BenevolentAI
www.linkedin.com/in/araujosonia/
Sonia is a self-proclaimed product management crusader. For her, product management is about the holistic business management of products and about people. She is passionate about delivering value to the business, its customers and industry. Sonia started her career by co-founding an e-learning company, which they successfully grew and sold a few years later. She then turned to software for life sciences and has never looked back. Driven by solving market challenges in B2B SaaS, her experience spans from product ideation to launch, from operations to go-to-market strategy and stakeholder engagement.

Debbie McMahon - Interim Chief Product Officer @ Financial Times
www.linkedin.com/in/dmcmahon/
Debbie is an experienced product leader focused on helping her teams solve complex problems, particularly in larger organisations that are committed to moving to a more user focused environment. She currently works at the Financial Times as the Chief Product Officer leading the product organisation which spans Product, Research and Design across a domain including B2B/B2C/internal teams. Before that she was the Product Director leading the FT’s consumer business and previously worked at the BBC and in the UK Government.

Pooja Naidu VP of Product @ Mews
www.linkedin.com/in/poojanaidu77/
Pooja is a VP of Product at Mews with proven leadership skills and a significant array of Product management and leadership in multiple industries including commerce, news, and hospitality. She’ll be speaking on the topic of “Unconventional Product Leadership” and adapting to business needs. She will also share practical advice and learnings as well as highlight controversially rewriting the playbooks.

James Gunaca, Product Management Career Coach, was our host for the evening.
www.linkedin.com/in/jamesgunaca
‪@CoachJamesGunaca‬

This event is sponsored by Pendo.

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www.linkedin.com/company/producttanklondon/

00:00 Intro
06:42 - Sonia Araujo
28:43 - Debbie McMahon
48:08 - Pooja Naidu
1:17:09 - Q&A with the guests