In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa addresses a recent Twitter topic worth further discussing: how important it is for PMs to carve out the time for creative thinking and processing outside of scheduled meetings and tasks. Then she dives into subscribers’ questions about measuring the value of a platform change, how to create prototypes when the product requires personalization and balancing outcome-focused and functional-focused work.
Melissa Perri welcomes Giff Constable to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Giff is a product leader and former CPO of both Meet Up and Neo. Giff is passionate about helping product people sharpen their financial skills, which is a big topic of conversation in this episode. He talks to Melissa about why it’s key that product executives understand the nuances of financials, the most important relationships for a product executive to cultivate and how, why Giff never regrets investing time in the exercise of creating FP&A models, the ins and outs of understanding valuation, and so much more.
Read MoreIn this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about whether or not having clearly defined terms and a common language within an organization matters, how to convince founders to hand over the product reins and hire an interim CPO, and how to convince your team and leadership that you belong in your new role as Director of Product.
Melissa Perri welcomes John Athayde to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. John is a design team leader, strategist, and individual contributor, as well as VP of Design at PowerFleet. John and Melissa discuss how he shifted focus to the importance of internal tools at Living Social, how he got buy-in from leadership to prioritize internal tools, the process of creating a design system for a scaling organization, the benefits of design systems, design systems vs. style guides, and the tools and org structure he recommends to get set up for success.
Read MoreIn this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about relationships between program and product managers, the right questions to ask during the interview process so you end up in a company with strong product values, and how to experiment when iterating on complex hardware.
Melissa Perri welcomes Donna Lichaw to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Donna is a product leader turned leadership coach and the author of The User's Journey. She joins Melissa to talk about how she helps leaders and executives answer questions like, “how do I get my team excited to show up to work every day?” by becoming the heroes of their own stories. They discuss the importance of being clear on what untrue stories you might tell yourself and the importance of self-awareness, common challenges Donna faces when working with leaders, the helpful side of imposter syndrome, and how to identify your own superpower and use it for good.
Read MoreIn this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about how to handle the unfortunate reality that oftentimes product managers are blamed for things out of their control, how to communicate to engineers when it’s time to pivot off of a project they’ve devoted a lot of time and effort towards, and how to build a shiny new product without completely disregarding all of the learnings from the original one.
Josh Seiden is Melissa Perri’s guest on this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Josh is a consultant and bestselling author of Lean UX, Sense and Respond, and his latest book, Outcome Over Output: Why Customer Behavior Is the Key Metric for Business Success. In this week’s show, he and Melissa explore why saying “outcomes over outputs” is a lot easier than actually committing to it in practice, measurable outcomes, correlation versus causation, the problem with getting fixated on process, and how to keep your team focused on outcomes as a leader.
Read MoreIn this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about ways to research and stay on top of the market in order to conduct a thorough competitive analysis, when adopting a Stage Gate process makes sense and how to design it, and how to organize teams around the product strategy framework.
Melissa Perri interviews Tara Scott at the Agile 2022 Conference on this week’s episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Tara is an experienced product coach and organizational behavior design coach who specializes in psychological safety, which is the ability to speak up in the workplace without fear of negative consequences. Tara tells Melissa how experiences in her own family led her to this important line of work, how she realized psychological safety could actually help increase organizational agility, what happens when a company isn’t psychologically safe, why having a “work” version of you is actually harmful, the inevitable uncomfortable moments that come with creating a safer work environment, particularly for leadership, and more.
Read MoreIn this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about the importance of hiring a more experienced product leader to help more junior product managers steer clear of bad product habits, how to organize and manage an influx of ideas from different stakeholders, why product shouldn’t be part of the IT organization, and where project managers fit in a product led team.
Melissa welcomes Becky Flint to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Becky is the Founder and CEO of Dragonboat, the responsive portfolio platform for product and technology leaders, and is an expert in outcome-focused product practice and operations. Becky joins Melissa to discuss how she recognized the need for a portfolio management tool like Dragonboat, why portfolio management should be adopted by any size team, common pitfalls in early portfolio management, why it’s the next iteration of agile, and how to implement a portfolio management practice into an organization.
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In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about what to expect when transitioning from a small to a large product team, how to work with subject matter experts that have strong opinions on product design, and making the case for creating an internal product team to support a growing organization.
Melissa Perri welcomes Gopal Erinjippurath to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Gopal is the co-founder, CTO and Head of Product at Sust Global, a company whose mission is to “develop data-driven products that enable every business decision to be climate informed so that humanity can thrive in a changing planet.” Gopal joins Melissa to discuss climate sustainability and why climate data is proving to be valuable to all kinds of organizations, how he tested and iterated to build this complex data product, how he’s de-risking bets in a rapidly evolving market, the balance of being mission driven and commercially minded, and the importance of making product thinking part of an organization’s DNA.
Read MoreIn this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about scaling up a whole junior product team at once, how a listener can align her team’s KPIs to user value, and why product managers are more susceptible to experience burnout.
In this special episode of the Product Thinking Podcast, Melissa Perri invites three graduates from her CPO Accelerator program to share their stories, insights, and advice about moving into the C-suite. Amy Carmichael of Crowdcube, John Martin of Housecall Pro, and Simone Dive of Clir Renewables all recently took on the Chief Product Officer role in their companies. They tell Melissa what it was like to make the jump, how the job differs from other product leadership roles, how to start practicing for the job now as an IC, and the skills they recommend strengthening if you hope to land a CPO job in the future.
Read MoreIn this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about organizations that are at a crossroads. She talks about how to help reorganize a product hierarchy that’s lacking strategic product development, how to shake up an org that seems content to operate as a feature factory, and where to focus your company’s resources and energy during an economic downturn.
Melissa Perri welcomes Steve Maclaughlin to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Steve is the Vice President of Product Management at Blackbaud, a cloud computing provider that serves clients within the social goods community. Steve shares his insights on what good product management looks like in nonprofit organizations, product managers as decision makers, the importance of benchmarking, and what it means to operate as a data-driven nonprofit.
Read MoreIn this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa wraps up our four part series on pivots by answering some of our listener’s questions on the topic. She talks about pivots as “strategy theater,” how to know when to stay on track versus when to pivot, having back-up pivot strategies in case the first idea doesn’t pan out, and communicating strategies amongst other product teams.
Melissa Perri welcomes John Shapiro to the third episode of this four-part miniseries about companies that successfully made major pivots during the pandemic. John is the Head of Product of Global Supplier at Wayfair. He manages a team of 60+ product managers, represents the company’s global suppliers, and ensures that products meet the standards of global consumers. Alex shares how Wayfair handled shifting from a heavily in-person culture to operating entirely online, how they rode an unexpected and sudden spike in business, how their long term vision and strategy kept them on course, how to keep a roadmap flexible even in an enterprise, managing employee burnout during the pandemic, and why they always come back to their customers’ problems above everything else.
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