Mission-driven product executive with over 14 years of experience driving product strategy and digital innovation for organizations ranging from growth-stage startups to Fortune 15 companies and mission-driven nonprofits. Team leader responsible for recruiting and coaching top-tier talent to successfully deliver products that accelerate revenue growth, engagement, and responsible, user-centric adoption of AI. Extensive responsibility for transforming the product management and design discipline from a service to a power function within organizations and navigating teams through early stage 0-1 product experimentation, hyper-growth, expansion, and maturity.
Currently Head of Product (Product Management, Design, Data & Analytics, Localization, and Support) for TED, reporting to CEO. Scope spans growth and retention across consumer web and mobile applications, newsletters, media and data platforms, and event technology.
Tricia Maia has been a guest on 1 episode.
-
Why Top-of-Funnel Traffic is Dead (& How TED is Replacing It ) | Tricia Maia, Head of Product (TED)
December 17th, 2025 | Season 1 | 34 mins 1 sec
business, digital experience, product management, technology
Today, we’re joined by Tricia Maia, Head of Product at TED. We all know TED Talks — but behind the scenes, TED is undergoing a massive product transformation to adapt to a post-AI media landscape. In this episode, Tricia Maia, Head of Product at TED, pulls back the curtain on how they’re solving the “discovery” crisis facing digital media today.
Tricia shares:
- Why “views” are dead: Explaining why TED is abandoning top-of-funnel traffic as their North Star metric and shifting focus to “depth,” completion rates, and account signups to combat volatile search algorithms
- AI that actually scales: How TED is using advanced AI auto-dubbing — not just subtitles — to clone speakers’ voices into other languages, driving 2-3x better performance
- The “gap” strategy: The challenge of connecting a decentralized ecosystem of free users and volunteers at TEDx with an ultra-premium live experience that can cost up to $12,500 per ticket