UX Stories Podcast

What happens when you stop asking users what they want — and start watching what they actually do? This supercut brings together 11 of the sharpest product and UX leaders from the UX Stories podcast for 60 minutes of unfiltered takes on building in the age of AI, vibe coding, and a generation of builders who've never done a usability test. From "NPS is the worst thing to happen to product" to an A...

What does usability testing have to do with booking a cruise, buying fine art, or fixing healthcare? Everything. In this episode of UX Stories, host Lihong Hicken sits down with a product leader who's worked across travel, e-commerce, and healthcare to unpack how user research actually works in the real world — including a brutal A/B test failure at TripAdvisor and a surprisingly warm (then ice-co...

🎙️ UX Stories | Episode with Mike Mancuso, Head of Product Design at Veoci Is the traditional design process dead? Mike Mancuso has 20 years of design leadership experience — from building design systems for 10M+ users at Wiley to leading public safety UX at BlueLine GRIT. In this episode, he breaks down how AI tools like Claude Code are completely transforming the way his team designs, and why he...

🔐 What does it take to build trust in a product users hope they never have to use? In this episode of They Said, host Lihong Hicken sits down with Ashish Malpani — Head of Product & Alliance Marketing at Corelight — a rare blend of cryptography patent holder, published novelist, and cybersecurity PMM. Ashish shares how he went from applications engineer → product management → product marketin...

What if your dashboard is lying to you? 📊❌ In this episode of UX Stories, host Lihong Hicken sits down with Aaron Montana, Head of Experimentation & Product Analytics at LaunchDarkly, to explore the real intersection of engineering, A/B testing, and user research — and why the future of testing might include machines testing for machines. 🤖 Whether you're a product manager, engineer, or UX...

What if your phone knew what you needed before you did? 🤯 In this episode of UX Stories, host Lihong Hicken sits down with Alina Hernandez Porrello, Director of UX Engineering at AgileEngine — the mind behind the groundbreaking Contextual Eruptive Forecasting Model (CIFM), built on Robert Rosen's anticipatory systems theory. Alina's framework doesn't just react to users — it anticipates them. No...

What separates great product leaders from the rest? According to Rana Mumtaz — veteran CPO who led product at GoDaddy and Spin, and now advises next-gen AI startups — it all comes down to one word: users. Not customers. Users. In this episode of UX Stories, host Lihong Hicken sits down with Rana to unpack how a "user-first" mindset drives real growth, why freemium models win, and what most AI-era...

What happens after you tap your card? Most people never think about it — until it breaks. 💳 In this episode of UX Stories, host Lihong Hicken sits down with Manish Upasani, Head of Product Management & Strategy at Utimaco, to uncover the hidden world of cryptography, hardware security modules, and the invisible trust layer powering the global digital economy. From a dramatic Black Friday paym...

What happens to UX design when AI can adapt to every user individually? Jason Levine — Head of UX for Agentic AI at AWS and 14-year UX professor at the University of Washington — joins host Lihong Hicken to unpack how agentic AI is reshaping product design, user research, and the future of the UX career. Jason shares how AI enables truly personalized experiences at scale, why human intuition is st...

What happens when a biochemist becomes a product design leader? Nate Patrick, Head of Product Design & Research at CAS, shares how his scientific background shapes how he builds tools for the world's most advanced chemical and biology discovery platform — and what the AI revolution really means for UX teams. 💡 In this episode: Why AI gives scientists (and designers) superpowers — not pink sli...

What happens when vibe coders skip user research? You build the wrong thing — fast. Dave Powell, Director of UX at QGenda, shares how his team does real usability work inside one of the most complex, HIPAA-restricted industries in the world. From Figma prototypes shown to hospital staff before a single line of code is written, to the moment a "warm" customer meeting turned ice cold — this is what...

In this episode of UX Stories, host Lihong Hicken sits down with Apurva Garware, SVP and Head of Product at Invisible Technologies — the company behind 80% of the world's AI companies. From Microsoft Azure to Amazon to EdTech, Apurva shares how first principles of teaching humans apply directly to training AI models, why hybrid human-AI teams are inevitable, and how vibe coding is transforming the...

In this episode of UX Stories, host Lihong Hicken sits down with Naveen Mohan, Product Manager and Head of Monetization at Otter.ai, to unpack the art and science of pricing in the age of vibe coding. 🚀 Naveen shares how his data science background at Carnegie Mellon shaped his product instincts, reveals a pricing experiment that looked like an early win but turned into a 20% revenue loss 😬, and...

Mike Bal, Head of Product at David's Bridal, joins Lihong Hicken on UX Stories to talk about building digital experiences for one of the most emotional customer bases on the planet — brides. From merging deep legacy retail expertise with modern product thinking, to why he believes formal usability testing isn't always necessary, Mike shares how his lean team ships fast, gathers scrappy feedback, a...

🔥 Mazen Letayf, Head of Product at Alkami Technology, delivers a masterclass on why vibe coding is creating a tsunami of low-value software — and what builders should do instead. With experience leading product at Capital One, Cox Automotive, and Credit Acceptance, Mazen makes a compelling case: the real bottleneck isn't code speed — it's deeply understanding your customer. He shares how his team...

Jonathan Abon, a seasoned CPO and engineer with 30 years in AI/neural networking, joins Lihong Hicken to discuss the real challenges facing B2B software companies in the age of vibe coding. They explore why speed without direction is dangerous, how to balance rapid prototyping with proper user feedback, and Jonathan's "Usability Index Scoring" framework for measuring user experience in near real-t...

Jodi O'Prandy, VP of Product at 1stDibs, joins host Lihong Hicken on UX Stories to break down what luxury e-commerce and travel booking have in common — and where they diverge. They discuss how trust factors differ between a $500 flight and a $50,000 piece of fine art, the TripAdvisor filter redesign that failed because it skipped user testing, why hyper-personalization is the future of e-commerce...

Dan Breyre has built products at Amazon, Apple, and JW Player during the internet's biggest shifts. Now as Head of Product at Sofar Ocean, he's applying big tech wisdom to ocean intelligence—helping scientists and governments make better decisions about our planet's most critical, least understood data set. In this episode of UX Stories, we dig into: • The fundamental truth about users Dan learned...

AI has made product development 10x faster—but user research is stuck in the past. How do modern builders ship products users love when traditional testing can't keep pace? In this episode of US Stories, Lihong Hicken (former UserTesting executive who scaled the company from zero to IPO) sits down with Arvind Duhan, Chief Product Officer at DispatchTrack, for an honest conversation about the speed...

Steven Lamb, Product Leader at Addepar, reveals the hidden tension in modern product development: we can build 10x faster with AI, but user testing is still stuck in the past. In this episode of UX Stories, we explore how wealth tech companies balance rapid innovation with zero margin for error when managing trillions of dollars. Key Topics: • Why "vibe coding" is outpacing traditional user testin...

In this episode of UX Stories, host Lihong Hicken sits down with Abhishek Vyas, Director of Product Management at Auditoria. AI, to explore how AI is transforming enterprise product development. 🎯 Key Topics Covered: • The current state of agentic AI in enterprise environments • How AI committees are shaping enterprise AI adoption • Vibe coding vs. traditional product development workflows • The...

AI has made building products 10x faster—but are we forgetting our customers in the process? In this episode, I sit down with Alex Pyatigorskiy, Head of Product at Vama and former Chief Digital Business Officer at Disney, to tackle the biggest challenge facing product teams today: how to maintain customer-centricity when vibe coding has replaced traditional product development. 🎯 KEY TOPICS: • Wh...

Your product roadmap is moving faster than your customers can keep up. That gap is silently killing adoption, retention, and expansion revenue. Watch this episode to learn how to validate what matters before you ship. Most B2B SaaS teams don’t have a product problem—they have a feedback speed problem. In this episode of UX Stories, Lihong Hicken sits down with Fy Knight (Head of Product at Recidiv...

B2B SaaS teams are shipping faster—but adoption and trust aren’t keeping up. That gap silently drains pipeline efficiency, retention, and expansion. Watch this episode to learn the strategic approach UX leaders use to scale with confidence. Speed is not the same as progress. Jason Moore (Head of User Experience at Planful) breaks down what’s changing in UX leadership as AI accelerates building, de...

Your product is shipping faster than your customers can keep up. That gap is quietly killing adoption, retention, and expansion revenue. Watch this episode to learn the strategic fix top product leaders use to scale growth. Building faster isn’t the same as building better. In this episode of UX Stories, Sam Ho (ex-Head of Product at Tuning, VP Product at Sendoso, Director of Product at Glassdoor)...