What I Wish I Knew Before Writing a Book
Melissa Perri
by Melissa Perri
3M ago
Since publishing my second book, Product Operations, in October, I’ve been reflecting on what I learned writing two business books and wanted to share those insights that I wish someone had shared with me before I started. Escaping the Build Trap has sold over 75,000 copies in 5 years, and my second book Product Operations came out just a few months ago. If you're considering writing a business book, here are some of the biggest lessons I've learned that might help you. Know What You Want to Say Before You Begin Writing a book really boils down to caring deeply about what you're trying to say ..read more
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Are We Getting Rid of Product Managers?
Melissa Perri
by Melissa Perri
9M ago
A few weeks ago, Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, said they were “getting rid fo Product Managers”. Which created an insane swirl in the community. He later clarified and said it was not going away, but morphing this into a more business related role, rather than purely tech. I don't think this is a bad thing. Product Management has always firmly sat between business, tech, and the user/customer. In SAAS companies, the Product Management role has always been about figuring out how to grow the business by solving customer problems with the right software. In other companies that are not softwa ..read more
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A Decade of Product Management
Melissa Perri
by Melissa Perri
2y ago
I've been reflecting on the last decade in Product Management. We've come a long way but we still have far to go. These are a few of my observations and personal experiences. Not every company has seen all these changes, but by and large I think it's been a positive push forward and I'm proud of where we've come from and where we have gotten to. -- 2014: "I do not need Product Managers, I can run my company myself,.I have the strategy." 2019: "How do I hire a Chief Product Officer? I need them yesterday." Founders realizing they can't do it all on their own, that Product Management is a c ..read more
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Prioritization Shouldn't Be Hard
Melissa Perri
by Melissa Perri
2y ago
A while ago, I was interviewing a VP of Product candidate for a client. They were on the case study portion of the interview, where they had to prioritize major initiatives for the company. We explained that the objective wasn’t to get the prioritization completely right, and it was more for us to understand their thought process. They had access to any people or any data they needed from the company. The candidate first went to the CEO and talked to him about the short term and long term goals of the company, which ended up being something like this: Grow revenue Reduce costs for operati ..read more
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Product Operations: The Fuel for Winning Product Strategies
Melissa Perri
by Melissa Perri
2y ago
46.8% of product decision makers cite lack of quality data as the main challenge they make when making decisions and only 21.9% always or almost always use data to back decisions. Source: How Decisions Are Made by Alpha Everybody in Product has subscribed to the importance of data as a driver of high quality decision-making by now. But tragically few are able to do it. ? Enter: Product Operations — the art of removing obstacles from evidence-based decision making. Done right, it fuels a virtuous cycle of benefits that’ll empower everyone from the execu ..read more
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Introducing the CPO Accelerator
Melissa Perri
by Melissa Perri
2y ago
I’m very excited to announce a new division of Produx Labs, specifically focused on growing future Chief Product Officers for growth stage companies. In late March of 2018, Shelley Perry of Insight Venture Partners reached out to me about an opportunity. When she asked me what I was passionate about, I said developing great product leaders. Little did I know that would soon become a reality. Over the next few months, Produx Labs and Insight Venture Partners created a partnership that was two-fold: provide right-sized services to scale Product Organizations at their gr ..read more
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Podcast: How to Think Like a Product Manager
Melissa Perri
by Melissa Perri
2y ago
I was very excited to be on Roadmunk's podcast talking about Product Institute and how we teach Product Managers to think. The key takeaway is: it's not a linear process. Product Management involves a lot of assessing and analyzing before acting. Every project surrounding the improvement or creation of a product or feature will look different. Good Product Managers know how to evaluate where they are, then choose the right tools and processes to act. Check out the full podcast here: You can also read the full text of the podcast on Roadmunk's website here.   ..read more
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Please Try.
Melissa Perri
by Melissa Perri
2y ago
“What have you tried to fix that problem?” Over the past year, I’ve spent most of my time working with Product Managers, UX Designers, and Leadership of companies going through some sort of change. Change in process, change in roles, and a lot of change in expectations. Usually this is branded as an “Agile Transformation”, but whatever you want to call it, it’s change. With that change comes a lot of uncertainty, and resulting from that, angst. In the middle of that angst, surfacing whenever someone tries to offer some advice to navigate the change, I hear the same phrase over and over a ..read more
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What Everyone Gets Wrong About Stakeholders
Melissa Perri
by Melissa Perri
2y ago
When I first started in Product Management, I was told that my job was to keep my stakeholders happy. My stakeholders were members of the sales team. I understand that many Product Managers are taught better today that stakeholders include customers and users, but I was taught the term was reserved for internal folks who had a say in our product. Customers and users were considered separately, and handled differently. So for the purposes of this article, I'm just talking about the internal stakeholders of your company. Part of my job was "managing" these stakeholders. I kept them informed of o ..read more
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Dog Food-ing Our Way To V2 of Product Institute
Melissa Perri
by Melissa Perri
2y ago
Eating your own dog food is worth the challenge. After a few years of consulting, I started to feel the itch to work on a product again. I was teaching everyone how to create products people loved, but I wasn’t making any myself.  Product Institute gave me and my team a chance to do just that. This week, we’ve reached a huge milestone enrolling our 100th public student into the class. She will be joining over 500 private and public students from over 18 countries in their Product Management learning journey. One of our class tenets is that product managers are not done with a new feature ..read more
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