In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa Perri answers subscribers’ questions about how to respond when people say product development doesn't go fast enough, getting the business to understand that subject matter experts are not the same as PMs, and how to work with a customer success team.

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa Perri answers subscribers’ questions about how product managers and product owners should work together, product management trend predictions and what the future of product might look like, and what to do when your CEO is misdirecting blame towards product management.

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa Perri answers subscribers’ questions about how product managers and product owners should work together, product management trend predictions and what the future of product might look like, and what to do when your CEO is misdirecting blame towards product management.

Melissa Perri welcomes Jared Spool to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Jared and Melissa talk about how user experience as a discipline has grown over the years, the challenges that come with it, and how to improve UX for both product leaders and customers.

Jared is the co-founder, co-CEO, and Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre - UIE, where he and his team “uncover what it takes to drive organizations to deliver the best-designed products and services.” Throughout his career, Jared has worked in the White House and has been instrumental in establishing digital organizations and shaping the future of UX. His extensive experience and expertise in the field have earned him a reputation as a thought leader in the UX community.

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about how to pivot from product management to a career as an independent product consultant, how to handle coaching roadblocks when working with new product owners, and the ins and outs of book publishing. 

Welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking podcast. This week, host Melissa Perri is joined by Patrick Campbell, CEO of Profitwell. They discuss all things pricing, diving deep into the psychology behind pricing models and how to choose a pricing strategy. Patrick talks about the biggest mistakes businesses make when pricing, when and how often you should be raising your prices, how to align your price changes with your value metrics and communicate those changes to customers, and more. 

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about whether or not adding a business owner into a product team is the right call, how much detail product managers should provide to their engineering teams, and if there’s a right time to join a startup as a product manager. 

In this week’s episode, Melissa Perri and Christina Wodtke, author of Radical Focus, get into all things OKRs. Christina shares how she discovered the power of OKRs, why she sees OKRs as a “vitamin, not a medicine,” why OKRs aren’t synonymous with product strategy, what it looks like to apply key results in the wrong way, how to use OKRs to create “super employees,” and so much more. 

In this week’s episode, Melissa Perri invites April Dunford, author of the best-selling book Obviously Awesome, How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It on the podcast. April has 25 years of experience leading marketing, product, and sales teams and now runs her consulting firm, helping companies of all shapes and sizes, including Google, IBM, Postman, and Epic Games, nail their positioning. 

We’ve made it to our 100th episode of the podcast! Melissa celebrates by tying up the year with a full review of your most frequently asked questions. Common themes included transitioning into a new role, communicating with leadership, how to divide product work amongst different teams, and many more. Listen in as Melissa summarizes her advice on each of these big topics, and then shares her product predictions for 2023 (including a conversation about why winning in a recession is largely connected to good product management). Happy New Year to all of our listeners! 

Melissa Perri welcomes Ezinne Udezue to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Ezinne is the CPO of WP Engine, a platform that provides solutions to create marketable sites and apps on WordPress, as well as the author of Product Management for Product-Led Growth, coming 2023. Melissa asks Ezinne what she thinks the key is to being a successful product leader, Ezinne shares her definition of product-led growth, and they discuss how product-led growth applies to B2B and Enterprise products, core PLG tactics, what PMs need to understand about marketing and how product collaborates with marketing and sales in a PLG company, and much more. 

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about overlap between roles, pitfalls companies fall into while scaling, and to what extent a company should be product-led.

Melissa Perri welcomes Janna Bastow to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Janna is the founder of Mind the Product and the CEO and founder of ProdPad, which is software that helps manage your roadmap and product backlog. Janna and Melissa discuss the story of how ProdPad came to be and why Janna was inspired to build a more robust road mapping tool, how to become the most informed PM in your industry, the process behind creating the Now, Next, Later roadmap format and why it’s caught on, how to communicate with other teams both before and after you create your roadmap, and how to influence your leadership to evolve their processes and thinking around road mapping. 

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about advocating for resources in a non-leadership role, whether or not a bottoms-up transformation can really work if leadership isn’t immediately on board, and how to effectively communicate with teams outside of product in order to set realistic expectations and get them on your side.

Ken Norton is Melissa Perri’s guest on this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Ken is an executive coach who is passionate about “whole person” coaching– he works with product leaders not just on their careers but on their growth and development in all facets of their lives. Ken joins Melissa to discuss the evolution of product management, the stark difference between empowered and unempowered product teams, his biggest piece of advice to early career PMs, what great leadership looks like, his 14 years of experience working at Google and on products like Google Maps and Google Calendar, and why ultimately, product is all about people.

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.