Melissa Perri

Product owners transition by proactively taking ownership of strategic work.

"If you're a product owner... try to take some ownership over strategic work."

Writing strategy in prose (memos) forces clarity and exposes gaps in logic that bullet points or slides might hide.

"I have CEOs write two-pagers on where did the company come from? How is it different today? What are our external treats to our market? What's our competition? How do you view our competition? What sh..."

Product strategy fails when the executive team operates with competing departmental goals rather than a unified company objective.

"One of the biggest issues I see in organizations is when executives all have different goals, and they're not aligned on the same goals for the company... And the executive team should be one team."

This simple question aligns stakeholders around outcomes.

"What do we hope will happen when we release this? - best question anyone can ask."

When hiring a Chief Product Officer, prioritize candidates who can bridge the gap between technical execution and executive-level communication.

"When you get into needing a CPO, it's like, hey, we actually have to pull together a product strategy that's all encompassing. We have to have great communication between product and the executive tea..."

Successful transformations require complete product operating models, not just Scrum.

"You want a development operating model. That's not actually going to help you with product management."

Executive-level product leadership requires a deep understanding of financials and the ability to navigate relationships with the board and CFO.

"Where the gaps come between that and becoming an executive is interfacing with the board, understanding the financials super deeply so that you can create revenue projections off of what your roadmaps..."

Personal growth in product management requires applying the retrospective framework to one's own career and learning habits.

"I think the biggest message I can tell to anybody learning, is really, sit down, do a retrospective with yourself, and say, is this helping me get better at being a product manager? And if it's not, c..."

A vision is not a marketing tagline; it must be a concrete description of what the company will manifest into over the next five to ten years.

"I once asked all the executive team at a healthcare company, what's the vision for this company? And they said, to be the backbone of healthcare. And I said, what does that mean? And they couldn't ela..."

Effective visions are lofty enough to require iteration but concrete enough for employees to visualize the end state.

"A vision should be concrete enough where people can picture what it will be in their head. It can't be a fluffy... be the backbone of healthcare. What does that mean? I don't get it. So people need to..."

A strong vision provides clarity by explicitly stating what the company will not do or become.

"I love reading a vision that's like, we're not going to be like that. And that, to me, is so powerful because you're like, oh, okay, we're not going to copy that. We're not going to go after that."

Vision and discovery must precede and inform delivery cadences.

"SAFe is not good at describing how you do discovery work."

The core challenge of scaling is ensuring every tactical team activity is prioritized to support the high-level company strategy.

"It just always comes back to how do I set strategy, how do I deploy strategy, and how do I make sure it's well communicated and that everything that we're doing on the tech teams, on the product teams..."

Roadmap prioritization is successful when individual contributors can articulate the business value and market impact of their specific tasks.

"A good test is you go to all of your teams, and you ask them what they're doing and why... They can connect everything they're doing, from the tactical stuff on the team, all the way back up to the bu..."

Sales teams are a primary source of competitive intelligence and can provide direct insights into why the market prefers other solutions.

"Go have a conversation with sales and see why people were buying competitors? What was your win-loss analysis? Why are we losing? What do you think is the issue?"

The guest discusses this as a critical function for scaling product organizations, focusing on standardizing roadmaps, scaling user research, and surfacing data insights.

"Product management at scale is really hard, and that's where product operations comes in. So what it does is it helps you get the right insights to the team, and then help standardize those outputs an..."