The Product Experience (Mind the Product)
How to Build Your Emotional Intelligence - Pippa Topp (CPO, Giffgaff)
Why It Matters
Developing EI is crucial for product leaders because it directly impacts decision‑making, stakeholder relationships, and team morale, leading to better product outcomes. As remote and cross‑functional work becomes the norm, the ability to navigate emotions and communicate empathetically is more relevant than ever for sustaining high‑performing teams.
Key Takeaways
- •Emotional intelligence means recognizing feelings, regulating responses, building empathy.
- •Defensiveness signals low EI; pause, question emotions before reacting.
- •Use Conscious Competence ladder to develop EI from unconscious incompetence.
- •Coaching tools: life story, fact‑vs‑story separation, empathy maps.
- •Balance empathy with accountability for effective product leadership.
Pulse Analysis
Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to recognize our own feelings, understand how others experience situations, and regulate our behavior accordingly. In product management, where cross‑functional collaboration and rapid decision‑making are routine, high EI fuels clearer stakeholder communication, reduces misinterpretation, and drives better outcomes. Teams that can separate facts from the stories they tell themselves respond more thoughtfully to changing market signals and internal pressures. As Pippa Topp explains, moving from unconscious incompetence to conscious awareness creates a foundation for stronger product leadership and a culture where ideas are evaluated on merit rather than ego.
The conversation highlights common EI pitfalls such as defensiveness during feature‑request meetings. When a product manager reacts instinctively, they often amplify conflict and stall progress. Topp recommends the Conscious Competence ladder—identifying unconscious incompetence, making it conscious, practicing consciously, then achieving unconscious competence through repetition. Coaching techniques like asking for a life story, distinguishing factual events from personal narratives, and using empathy‑mapping tools help individuals surface blind spots. giffgaff’s internal insights survey, which visualizes behavioral color blends, offers a data‑driven way to spot empathy gaps and guide targeted development.
Topp’s journey shows the need for balance: early competitiveness turned into over‑empathic micromanagement after motherhood and therapy. She now pauses before judging, asks “what did we actually provide?” and blends active listening with clear accountability—an approach similar to radical candor without harshness. Leaders can embed this by pairing peer coaching with regular reflection, ensuring empathy fuels decisions rather than paralyzes them. For product teams, cultivating EI is a strategic capability that directly improves delivery speed, customer satisfaction, and business growth.
Episode Description
Pippa Topp, Chief Product Officer at giffgaff, joins Lily and Randy to talk about emotional intelligence in product teams — what it is, how it develops, and why it matters for leadership. The conversation covers recognising defensiveness as an EQ signal, the conscious competence model, applying empathy inward as well as outward, and how to cultivate a culture of reflection across a product org. Pippa also shares her own journey from judgement to over-empathy to finding the balance, and makes the case for self-belief as the foundation of emotional resilience.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction & what is emotional intelligence?
04:39 – How low EQ shows up at work: defensiveness and reactive communication
08:28 – Extending product empathy skills to stakeholders and peers
10:33 – The conscious competence model and coaching people who don't know what they don't know
13:21 – Coaching techniques: life stories, separating facts from narrative
14:58 – Assessment tools and organisational EQ at giffgaff (Insights)
16:33 – Pippa's own EQ journey: from judgement to over-empathy to balance
22:37 – Coaching a junior PM through resistance, self-doubt, and breakthrough
28:40 – Leading through a forced decision: surfacing team emotion to move forward
32:39 – Cultivating EQ culture: group coaching, values-based behaviours, measurement
38:48 – Neurodivergence, self-awareness, and building a feedback culture
44:00 – Can AI support emotional intelligence?
47:41 – Is it okay to cry at work?
51:29 – Self-belief as the foundation of emotional resilience
Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.
Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.
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