ProductTank Newcastle

Hello all,
We are looking forward to welcoming you to another fantastic evening of inspiring and practical product talks at the ProductTank Newcastle Meetup for May.

The event details are as follows:
Date: Wednesday, May 27, 2026.
Time: 6PM-8:30PM
Location:
Harvey Nash Office
Studio 11, Hoults Yard
Walker Road
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE6 2HL

Talk 1
Speaker: Anshuman Bagri
Title: From Discovery to Delivery: Cutting the Theatre, Keeping the Show
Talk synopsis
Most teams can do discovery, but momentum often drops when it’s time to execute handovers get messy, decisions drift, and stakeholders lose confidence. I’ll share a lightweight playbook I’ve used to carry discovery outputs into delivery: converting ambiguity into an executable backlog, setting stable cadences and crisp definitions of done, using a decision log for accountability/faster unblocking, and using prototype-as-a-living-spec to reduce interpretation loops so engineering can progress while feedback continues in parallel.
I’ll also touch on a practical tension in product: avoiding “product theatre” while keeping just enough spectacle to align teams anchored in real user problems and measurable outcomes.

Anshuman's bio
Ansh Bagri is a Senior Product Manager at hedgehog lab. He builds products in messy, regulated environments, turning manual workflows into simple, measurable outcomes. He specialises in bridging discovery to delivery, translating user insight into executable plans and shipping small slices fast. He found product through professional theatre and early-stage startups, and still brings that lens to balancing authenticity with the right amount of “show” to align teams.

Talk 2
Speaker: Tobi Ogunmoyero
Title: 50 Offices, Zero Enthusiasm: How I Got an Entire Company to Stop Using Email
Synopsis:
For more than a decade, advisers at a UK financial services firm with a national footprint ran their work through email. Everything went through the inbox, from new business to withdrawals to compliance checks. By the time anyone noticed a request had stalled, the client had usually noticed first.
I was tasked with fixing it. What looked like a tooling problem turned out to be a trust problem. People did not need a new system so much as they needed a reason to stop doing what had worked for them for ten years.
Twelve months later, the platform was mandatory.
It had processed tens of thousands of requests, cut average turnaround by more than half, and finally gave leadership the real-time view they had been asking for. We later layered AI on top, inside a regulated environment, without losing compliance approval along the way.
This talk is what actually happened, including the discovery work that almost failed before it began, the phased rollout that earned adoption rather than forcing it, and the deliberate sequencing that kept compliance on side instead of holding the work up.
You will leave with a discovery approach that survives sceptical stakeholders, a phased rollout method that earns trust before mandating anything, and a practical way to introduce AI features in a regulated environment without triggering a compliance lockdown. It is the honest version of what worked and what nearly did not.