The Roundabout Show with Tim Courtney

At 17, Bjarne Tveskov answered a newspaper ad for a LEGO spaceship designer, quit school, and never went back. He designed the Monorail, early Blacktron sets, and helped shape LEGO's first digital products. Decades later, he prototyped Smart Brick concepts from his basement using childhood bricks alongside new ones. Every piece still connects. This conversation maps the arc from bricks to digital...

Thaniya Keereepart has spent 20+ years at the intersection of product, community, and behavioral economics, from MLB's first live streaming app to TED's founding head of product, scaling TED from 500K to 2 billion video views and building TEDx. She's navigated the tension between what a brand wants to be and what its community needs it to become at Patreon, Harvest, the Athletic, and MetaLabel. Th...

Customer experience isn't customer service with a bigger budget. It's the operating system. Jeannie Walters has spent two decades proving that to Fortune 500 teams, and her book Experience is Everything codifies the playbook. Tim and Jeannie dig into what happens when CX leaders drive change from the middle of an org chart, why your B2B customers compare you to Uber, and how trust builds or erodes...

Steve Jennings has been building for four decades. Competitive cyclist turned founder of Maxim (Europe's top sports nutrition brand), then PepsiCo, open innovation, and now Jenerise, a creatine company co-founded with his daughter Rachael. We cover why comfort kills your edge, how endurance sport trained him for entrepreneurship, building consumer community before the internet, and how brands must...

Julie Mossler built the comms function at Groupon through its IPO, ran brand at Waze through the Google acquisition, and has been a four-time CMO across web2.0, crypto, and AI. Now she runs Common Fortune, advising founders on go-to-market and category building. This conversation covers building brands from the inside out, why small cross-functional teams outperform org charts, what AI is doing to...

LEGO® IDEAS turned fan creativity into a nine-figure product line. But the hard part wasn't the platform, it was integrating a disruptive innovation engine into an 80-year-old organization without killing the trust with users that made it work. Daiva Naldal led that integration, designing the systems that scaled a Japanese-language experiment into a global business, alongside host Tim Courtney who...

Danielle Baskin calls herself a situation designer — someone who creates bounded, episodic experiences that put people in novel interactions. From staging a fake 7-Eleven onigiri launch that generated news coverage, to running BART Basel, a rogue art show that roams subway platforms, Danielle has built a playbook for manufacturing belief, testing ideas in public, and building cult followings witho...

"People who can’t build spend most of their time trying to keep their job." "Give the product to the people who can build it and care most about it." Steven Walker has led design at Groupon and Quirky, some of the fastest growth stories of the web2.0 era. In this conversation we explore what actually makes products succeed under extreme pressure. Great products are rarely the result of process or...

She moved to San Francisco knowing almost no one. Three years later, she’d raised $9M and built one of the strongest operator networks in the city. In this episode, I sit down with Vera Maslova, a partnership and fundraising specialist who moved to the Bay Area without an existing network and built one deliberately. Since arriving, Vera has: • Raised over $9M • Convened dozens of curated founder d...

Explore how joy, dignity, and trust are transforming product design, emphasizing emotional connection, long-term thinking, and human-centered innovation. Himanshu Bharadwaj shares insights on integrating cognitive science, spirituality, and sensory experiences to create meaningful, loyal user relationships. Keywords Joyful Design, User Experience, Emotional Design, Product Innovation, Human-Center...

Episode 1: Imagining safer streets through design, community, and 3Dstreet with Kieran Farr In this first episode, I'm joined by Kieran Farr, creator of 3Dstreet, a tool that helps everyday people visualize and redesign their streets and public spaces. We discuss: How tools like 3Dstreet give people agency to visualize and remix their streets Why design-as-play opens up creativity and new possibil...