Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - How to create a winning product strategy | Melissa Perri

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

Every company wants to develop a winning strategy—but what are signs your strategy isn’t working, and how do you change course? Melissa Perri has worked trained PMs and product leaders at nearly all the Fortune 100 companies, and in this conversation shares how to reset a struggling strategy, align your team, and build winning strategy. Join us.—Find the full transcript here: https://www.podpage.com/lennys-podcast/how-to-create-a-winning-product-strategy-melissa-perri/#transcript—Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible:• Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/• RevenueCat: https://www.revenuecat.com/• Makelog: https://www.makelog.com/lenny—Where to find Melissa:• Website: https://melissaperri.com/• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lissijean• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissajeanperri/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—Referenced:• Melissa’s Book: https://melissaperri.com/book—In this episode, we cover:[00:00] What to expect with guest Melissa Perri[02:57] Melissa’s incredibly vast experience working with product manager’s [04:20] Melissa’s current focus: training and education of PM’s[05:59] The most common problems that product teams face[09:48] When to hire your first CPO[14:27] What to do before hiring a CPO[16:16] When to bring an interim CPO consultant like Melissa[21:26] Signs your team doesn’t have a strategy[22:59] Identifying your vision, strategy and intentions as a company[27:48] Signs you’re doing a bad job as a PM[30:30] The process of defining strategic visions[33:28] How to hone your craft as a PM[43:55] Melissa’s Book — Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value [48:43] How to avoid burnout [52:19] Where to find Melissa This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

I've met a lot of organizations that think most of their issues are in the training of their people. And 99% of the time I see that it's actually in the way that they're setting their goals and deploying their strategy. Because once you train those people, they have no context on what to work towards. So it's such a holistic approach when you actually go through these transformations or try to set up a product organization. So you either need somebody in there to do it or you've got to really be ready to move when somebody comes in to help you. Through her speaking, consulting, interim CPO roles and teaching at both Harvard Business School and online, Melissa Perry has seen more product orgs up close than possibly any human alive. In our chat, we cover the most common problems that product teams face and how to overcome them,

when to hire your first PM, how to hone your craft as a PM, signs you're doing a bad job as a PM, also how to structure your product teams and product development process, signs your team doesn't have a strategy and how to come up with one, also how to come up with a product vision, and so much more. I love chatting with Melissa, and I learned a ton, and I can't wait for you to hear this episode. If you're setting up your analytics stack, but you're not using Amplitude, what are you doing?

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Ditch your vanity metrics, trust your data, work smarter, and grow your business. Try Amplitude for free. Just visit Amplitude.com to get started. This episode is brought to you by Revenue Cat. Revenue Cat makes it easy to build, analyze, and grow in-app subscriptions on iOS, Android, and the web. Their platform lets you focus on growth rather than getting bogged down in subscription infrastructure. Revenue Cat provides a backend and wrapper around Apple StoreKit and Google Play billing to handle the implementation and upkeep of in-app purchases. Revenue Cat is your source of truth for customer status across platforms and provides out-of-the-box analytics.

for key subscription metrics, like monthly recovering revenue, lifetime value, retention, and more. With Revenue Cat, you also get pre-built integrations with best-in-class tools like Amplitude AppS supplier and Firebase. That means reliable, consistent data sync to your entire product and growth stack in minutes. See why companies like Notion, Visco, and Life 360 use Revenue Cat to power in-app subscriptions. Learn more at Revenuecat.com. Melissa, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me. Absolutely, my pleasure. I wanted to set a little context for folks that may not be familiar with you. How many PMs have you worked with and helped, would you say, over the course of your career? So between teaching, consulting, and all of those different things, it's probably north of 4,000 at this point. I think we're approaching 5,000 now. Oh my God. Okay. And then how many companies would you say you've worked with? So if we're talking like deep consulting since I started products labs, we've done over 30 companies where we've been in there, did something with them either transformation wise or setting up their PM work or setting their strategy, helping with roadmaps.

If we're talking training, we're into the multiple hundreds. Okay. Insane. Would you say that you're maybe in the top three? maybe top five people in the world that have worked with the most product managers, or have even met the most product managers? I know a lot of people who do what I do. So I think probably among them, probably among them. But I haven't counted everybody else's. Okay.

So for all these reasons, I'm really excited to dig into a lot of the stuff that you've learned along this journey and things that people can take away from your experience. What do you spend your time doing these days? I know there's a lot in your portfolio. Well, right now I'll say my primary focus. on training and education in product management. So I'm teaching at Harvard. I teach the second year MBAs in their elective program product management so they can choose whether or not they want to take that. But that's been really great. And then I have had an online school since 2016 called

Product Institute. So it's all a self-serve online education place where we have multiple courses in product management. We have trained almost all of the Fortune 100 companies at this point through that with product management, which is great, but a lot of different growth stage companies coming in there, too, and smaller companies as well. So I've been doing that for quite some time. And then I more recently started CPO Accelerator, which is a program to help VPs and heads of product really make the leap into the C-suite. So that's been really great because I believe that the more we train people to be better product executives, the better products they'll make and the better product managers they'll mate by training them as well. So that's been my primary focus. I am writing another book

called Product Operations. After writing escaping the bill trap, I thought I would never write again, but it's time. I know that feeling. So I'm excited about that. I'm writing it with my former VP of product at Products Labs, Denise. And yeah, before I was doing this, what I'm doing right now, I was doing all of that. Plus, I was also consulting pretty deeply with companies through products labs. But at the end of 2020, I took a step back from that to take a little break from it, kind of focus more on the teaching aspects of things and try to figure out what else I'm going to do from here. I love that you mentioned your book. You almost didn't. And I was going to make sure to mention it. And we're going to talk about it more in a little bit.

And I have it right here. And hopefully I can get it signed someday in real life. Before we get into that, so you've worked with dozens of companies directly, hundreds, maybe indirectly through the course. and then like you said, thousands of PMs, when you come into a company, they basically bring you in to help them level up their product team, their product management function. What are like one or two of the most common problems that you run into or even unexpected problems you run into, especially at modern tech companies, not like, you know, Ford and things like that, no offense. What do you run into usually? In 2014, I started consulting with companies through products labs. And it's funny because some people will be like, oh, well, you've never worked with, I get two sides of it. I'll get the, well, you don't really work with the SaaS companies.

But I had a whole partnership with Insight Venture partners where we go in and play the interim CPO role in their high growth SaaS companies. We'd help them scale. We'd set their strategy and their roadmaps and all that stuff. So we did that for a long time. And then I have also come in and helped organizations that aren't really SaaS like banks and a lot of banks, a lot of banks. but you're pharmaceutical companies and all these other ones to kind of set up product management for the first time. So I've seen the whole gamut from like super, you know, software focused teams to companies that are still just just figuring out software. And it's been great because some of the companies I've worked with now since 2014, I've been able to see, you know, eight years of their progressions and what they go through with that.

And I'd say like it's very different if you're SaaS versus non-sas. But if we're talking about like the SaaS companies that get software, like software is what they sell. Software is a critical part of the strategy. They're bought in. They know that it's really important. One of the biggest issues I kind of see with them and product management is at this pivotal scale up phase where they go from, hey, I found product market fit to I'm ready to scale. One, it's hiring a great chief product officer that can help them figure out what the next phase is. So it's basically there's this junction point where they go from single.

product to multi-product. Then they have to manage a complex portfolio and then they have to scale rapidly. That point, they have to rethink their entire strategy, right? And then they have to focus because they have all of these choices to keep building for their existing customers and, you know, just take everything off the, you know, the backlog because everybody's requesting things. They really have to focus and prioritize. And that becomes absolutely critical, but it's usually the first time that companies actually had to form a comprehensive strategy and a prioritized strategy and deploy it to hundreds of employees, which will scale to thousands of employees. And that is hard.

Like, it's not easy to do. And if you've never done it before, which a lot of people haven't in that position, that becomes really complicated. And then there's some companies, too, that bypass that initial growth phase because they already could clearly see what their, you know, second, third product should be. and they were scaling really fast and that's awesome and they're really, really successful, but then they start to plateau. And they have the same problem where they have to rethink, reprioritize.

And it just always comes back to how do I set strategy, how do I deploy strategy, and how do I like make sure it's well communicated and that everything that we're doing on the tech teams, on the product teams is laddered up into a company strategy that's well prioritized. But that has to be the biggest issue that I see with companies at all that are just like, They get the software piece. They know it's a critical part of their business. It's just like, how do we prioritize it and double down?

And build the org and find the right people to build it all out. I'd love to double click on that. What is a sign that it's time for a CPU? And then what do you look for when you're hiring a CPU? I know these are big questions, but I'd love to hear your thoughts. Usually whoever was a product leader, whether it was a founder or maybe somebody was a little bit more junior, in those phases at the beginning, finding product market fit, trying to get into the growth stage, early growth stage. it's really about execution at that point.

It's like rapidly experimentation trying to figure that out. And all hands on deck, you're usually a little bit in the weeds as well, doing the work yourself too. And then 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 team. A big sign for me when I've come in and worked with like boards or executive teams as well is they're telling me like, I don't really know what's going on in tech or product. I have no idea if we're like achieving our goals. If your executives and your board are telling you that, the person who's communicating those things to them are usually not chief product officer level. Right. Like if you are,

if your executives don't know what you're doing, that's that's a big problem. So that's usually the sign to me that we need that. I go in when I was going in and consulting like pretty deeply, the first thing I would do is go to all the teams. If there's, There's like 5,000 teams, a smattering of teams. But I'd always ask them, like, what are you working on? What's the most important thing you could be doing and why? And I would try to ladder that up myself into a strategy and see if it was connected, right? And if it wasn't connected, that's telling me somebody is not formulating the strategy

and deploying it down. And then that's telling me there's a lack of strategy at the top. And that would be like, hey, is there a CPO here? And if there is, maybe this person isn't right for the job. or there's no CPO, and we do need somebody around this to actually formulate that strategy. On an org design perspective with the team, I'd look at the product managers. If the product managers aren't, sometimes you have great product managers and they're frustrated because they're not getting the direction they need.

And you can tell they're great product managers, like they know what they're doing, they're in there, showing me there's a lack of leadership there. If there's trouble hiring product managers, that's a good sign that you need a CPO, you need somebody they can learn from and give them those opportunities. And if there's a lot of junior product managers who've never done it before, it's like, what's their training? You know, what's their training path? Is there something in there? Is there a process implemented where everybody can follow it?

Is there a way for them to learn? If those things are lacking, it's telling me like there's a gap in leadership on the product level. Awesome. That is really helpful. Is there like a number of PMs that usually ends up being of how many PMs you have when it's time to maybe hire a CPU? It really differs. I'd say the critical junction points I've found. found deal more with company strategy. So like we used to talk about this a lot at insight,

but it's kind of like if you're going above $10 million in ARR, it's usually when he hit around 20 to 30, you start to bring on a CPO and a high growth company. What the product starts to look like is you have multi-products. You have more than two or more. Sometimes you can have a VPU product over two. That's totally fine. But as soon as you start to think about expanding into a more complex portfolio after that, I'd look for probably a CPO. If you're expanding geographically, If you're going into new markets, like drastically new markets, the more complex your portfolio, the bigger the sign is that you need a CPO. If you're doing a major transformation or pivot, if you're doing a huge merger of two companies,

you're probably going to need a CPO over those two things. So those types of events usually lay to, if you don't have a CPO, it's time to get one. The number of product managers, I'd probably say it starts to hit around like, maybe eight, seven to eight is usually what I'd look for. But it depends on what the rest of the team looks like too. So a lot of times chief product officers, especially in a high growth company, are not going to be over just product, right? We'd have product reporting into them, design, some kind of product operations, sometimes analytics, depending on what company it is. And then even in certain cases, I put engineering underneath a CPO when there hasn't been really

strong engineering leadership and you need to have product leading tech. And maybe there's a disconnect there. And it's just like you don't have time. You need one leader. You need to simplify it and go. So depending on the scope that somebody is covering as well, if they're only seeing product and there's no opportunity for them to be over design or something else, we'll probably stick with the VP of product. But if you need a singular leader to bring all those things together, that's where I would start looking for a chief product officer too. What do you suggest companies do up until that point? I know titles are not necessarily consistent.

I imagine usually there's like a head of product before that point. Is that what you'd recommend? What you do do up until you get to a point where it's time for a CPO? A head of product or VP a product, I think, are very interchangeable in my head. What a VP of product or a head of product is is a functional leader around product management. Sometimes you have designed reporting into them, sometimes not. But they are very good at implementing processes so that product, smoothly. They can pull together the roadmap across all of your product managers. They can usually

train lower level people. Where the gaps come between that and becoming an executive is like interfacing with the board, understanding the financial super deeply so that you can create revenue projections off of what your roadmaps and your product's strategy is going to be. So like chief product officers have to deeply understand how to get from, you know, roadmap to revenue and how to analyze those things and put it into perspective. So they're usually joined at the hip with the chief revenue officer or the head of sales, the CFO. They can confidently protect to the board. They're a fantastic executive navigator when it comes to dealing with other executives and bringing those things together. And they can oversee a lot more functions than just

product usually. Like everything can kind of, you know, they're a senior enough person where you can have a couple different functional lies report into them with a head of design, head of product reporting up. So VPs of product are usually fantastic at growing like one or two products, but then when you get into multi-product strategies or very complex platform strategies and the scope starts to really creep, that's where I would start to bring in a CPU. I was going to ask you about what to look for in a CPU and you answered it. So amazing. Real quick, before we move on to kind of the skill of product management and some thoughts there, when would it make sense for a company to consider bringing in someone like you to do either interim

CPU role or just to help out? Yeah. So I hope you never need me. That's my goal with everything I do. I'm always like I just wanted to be, I would love to put myself out of business one day because I just want this to work really well. But where I am needed is usually when a CEO isn't sure. who is the right person to hire. They're usually on the fence.

I've come into organizations to help CEOs where they're like, do we need a product person to oversee this? Like I don't know what a product person does. And I usually talk them through like, hey, what are the challenges you're having? And they tell me everything. And I'm like, okay, these ones are actually caused by you not having that partner to work with. Like if you had that partner, this is what they could take off your plate and free you up

to focus on your vision and, you know, fundraising and all the other stuff they have to do as a CEO. Yeah. So typically that's where I'd come in to advise. And when I came in and consulting in the past, my motto was always like, well, first I'll say like I spent a long time doing transformational work where I would deeply embed and try to push org design and, you know, deploying strategy and really taking these organizations that didn't understand product management and helping them design how to do it. So I did that for quite a while. And then when I started working with growth stage companies, my. objective was like, how do I get in and get out as fast as possible and bring them in the right leaders? So what I learned having being like deeply embedded with these organizations doing this transformation work was, you know, somebody needs to be at the helm of all of this work consistently, right? And they also have to be able to make the decisions as well. So you can hire a consultant, but if you don't listen to the consultant, nothing's going to change. And that does

happen more often than you think where everybody does. hires and they're like, no, not that way. And you're like, okay, well, you know, it's up to you at the end of the day. I can't change it for you. I've also had people hire me as a consultant and be like, well, no, you change it. And I'm like, I can't. Like you can't just tell me to do your job. Like, you have to go out there and do it yourself. But I will give you all the important choices and try to design it to meet your needs. And, you know, sometimes it's not coming out super ideal and perfect, but it's all a transition, right? Like we make roadmaps for transformations. But being deeply embedded like this, I was starting to think, like, how do I make sure that this lasts? And that's where I believe

strong product leadership comes in. Whether you train somebody up in the organization to take that roll over and keep driving it forward or you hire in somebody who knows what they're doing. So when I started working with Insight, our premise was like, we will never touch a company or be in a company hands on for more than three months, right? And the idea was within that three months, we hire a chief product officer to take the helm and we do just enough to keep it on track, playing an interim CPO role to make sure that, you know, they can keep delivering, they can keep growing. We'd have just, you know, enough of a roadmap to keep the teams moving. We'd train them a little bit. We'd help implement some processes. We'd help set like, we'd help get all the information as CPO

would need so that when they walked into that organization, they could read the background on their customers, understand what the strategy is so far, look at the current roadmap, watch some customer interviews, you know, know who to talk to, get the lay of the land and have like some people working on stuff and then they could take the time they need to actually build a strategy that's going to help grow the company. So really at the end of the day, when you need some help, you realize something is not working, but you're not sure how to make it right. And then you can either hire in a leader. Sometimes the question is what kind of leader? That's when you try to hire a consulting, get some outside expertise on that. Or if you want to hire an interim CPO,

type person, you have to understand, like, that's very temporary, unless you're trying to, like, convert that person into a full time, which is totally fine if you want to do that and have those expectations going in. But consultants can only help as well when you're willing to take action. So I tell some companies as well at the beginning, like, you're not ready for this unless you are ready to take action. And sometimes that's drastic change. Sometimes that's changing up people. Sometimes you look at your organization and say, this isn't the organization that's going to get me to the next level. So we're going to have to make some changes. We're going to have to hire in some more senior people as well who can help train the masses of other people that need training.

We're going to have to make some hard decisions. And you have to reevaluate your strategy a lot of times and figure out how to set course with that too. I've met a lot of organizations that think most of their issues are in the training of their people. And 99% of the time, I see that it's actually in the way that they're setting their goals and deploying their strategy. Jeep because once you train those people, they have no context on what to work towards. So it's such a holistic approach when you actually go through these transformations or try to set up a product organization. So you either need somebody in there to do it or you got to really be ready to move when somebody comes in to help you.

I was going to save these questions for later, but it's a good attempt as I need to get into them around strategy, which your book is about, I would say is the fact that people just build feature, features, and don't really have a strategy or are using a strategy. And so just spending a little time there, what are signs that your team or your company either doesn't have a strategy or aren't using their strategy? Yeah, that's a great question. Signs that there are no strategy, teams are all working like dogs. Like they're working 80 hours a week. I see this all the time.

People are heads down, crunch and crunching, crunching, releasing, releasing, or sometimes not releasing, but they're working like crazy and none of the metrics are moving. So the executive team is going, what is happening? Product is a black box. Tech is a black box. We've got all of these people. What do they do all day? Like great example of when there is no strategy. And what usually is happening is there's this missing middle.

It's like we all know exactly what each team. We don't all know actually what each team is working on. The teams all know exactly what they're working on, which is usually some kind of feature enhancement, new features, whatever you got. right? The bug fixes all that wonderful stuff. They're the people they report to usually know what the teams are doing. But the executives are like, cool, how does that matter right to our business? How does that actually ladder up into our vision where we want to go? Our objectives for the year. Our goals. Great sign that there is actually no strategy deployed correctly. Now, when I say too, like there's no strategy, there's usually some kind of strategy that lives in people's

heads and they're really bad at writing it down and getting it out. So I always tell people, too, if you think that there's no strategy, like go just like interrogate people for a while, like go talk to the leaders. Is this good if we hit these numbers? Is this bad? Why? If I release this thing, what do you think will happen? What numbers will change, right? What behaviors will change? How will make us better? Usually you can pull out what people believe the goals to be and sometimes they're just not explicitly written down. So that's an exercise that I typically do too when I don't see strategy well manifested in these organizations. I just go in and I say like, okay, let's, like, what does good look like for you? Like, where is a vision? Where are we going? And I ask

all of these questions, too, to a lot of people. And you find that there's different answers across the organization. That shows a lack of alignment on a complete strategy as well. I once asked all the executive team at a health care company, like, what's the vision for this company. And they said to be the backbone of health care. I said, what does that mean? And they couldn't elaborate. Nobody could elaborate on that. And I said, cool, that's like a tagline, but it's not a vision, right? What are we manifesting into? What are we doing? What are we not doing? Who do we want to be when we grow up? Five to ten years from now, how are we different than we are today? Those things more often than not are not written down and they're not clearly communicated.

So one of the exercises we do is we write. If I see that there's no strategy, I'm like, you need to write a two-pager. I have CEOs write two-pagers on where did the company come from? How is it different today? What are our external threats to our market? You know, what's our competition? How do you view our competition? What should we care about?

What should we not care about? What are we going to do? What are we not going to do? And then prioritize their strategic intents, or what I call them, which are like really big business movers for the next, you know, two, three years. So it's like, are we going to go up market? Are we going to go down market? Are we going to expand geographically?

Are we going to innovate into a completely new market or a new opportunity? Those types of things need to be clearly prioritized at the top. And then you can start to make the product portfolio at the bottom. And when there's a missing strategy piece, I call it the missing middle is usually gone, which connects those strategic intents and those business outcomes back into what the teams are actually doing. So it's like, great. That team is, you know, building a widget for salespeople to do cold emails. Why?

Right? Like, how is that going to move us into what we want to do for our vision? Is it retaining people because we have a problem with their current market? Is it allowing us to enter a new market if we put it together? but if we think about all the things that teams do in isolation, it's not enough usually to move those business metrics. So what people do in a lack of strategy is they spread the team too thin across tons of initiatives. Like one team usually isn't enough to get some really hard-hitting metrics out there.

And then you don't see the progress that you're actually looking to see as an executive. If a feature ships, but no one knows about it, did it really ship? Keeping customers and internal teams like sales, support, and marketing in the loop on what's changing across your product is surprisingly hard. First, you have to dig through tickets and pull requests just to see what's been done. Then you have to figure out what's relevant to each person, craft updates, and then share them across all of your channels. Multiply this by the number of things that ship every week, and that's basically a full-time job just to keep everyone updated on what's changing. That's why high-velocity product teams like Monty Carlo, Armory, and Popsicle use MakeLog. MakeLog makes it easy to see what's happening across tools like Jira, Linear, Asana, and GitHub,

and then to write bite-sized updates, which you can immediately share with your audience wherever they are, including within your app on Slack, over email, and even on Twitter. No more long, boring, blog-style change log post that slow you down. Just quick and easy updates that keep your users informed and happy. Try MakeLog for free today. Just visit makelog.com slash Lenny to get started. like a PM on a team or even just a leader of a company. And you're like, hmm, I think we might have a strategy. Maybe we don't. I'm hearing like things that are true at our company and I'm kind of

worried. What does it look like for me to like have a strategy? You named a few things that you should probably have vision, intense and actions and things like that. What's like kind of like the checklist of if I have this, this, this, this, that. We have a, we probably have a strategy in place at least. A good test is you go to all of your teams and you ask them what they're doing and why, exactly what I was talking about before. And they all tell a similar story. We're working on X, Y, and Z because it will, it goes into this initiative, right? And it causes this type of value for these customers, which in return is going to get us this business value and help us enter these new markets, right? They can connect everything they're doing from the tactical stuff on the

team all the way back up to the business metrics. And if you deploy your strategy well, your product teams will deeply understand how their stuff actually impacts the business. And if you don't deploy it well, they're going to be like, I don't know why I'm building this stuff. So if you have a bunch of people asking you like, why are we building this? Then you didn't do a good job as a leader explaining what it is that you're after. Right. So everybody should be telling the same story. Another amazing sign when this is all done really well too that I love is there's usually way less infighting across stakeholders and executives. 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.

So it's kind of like sales team is over here like, no, like our goal is, you know, net new logos. And you're like, cool, but like in what markets and how is that prioritized against what we're building from our product roadmap? And why is this not in sync? And I've seen really bad CEOs, like, their executives against each other with different goals. So they don't see each other as one team. And the executive team should be one team. And the best teams I've ever seen, the most successful companies I've ever seen, everybody works together. And they're like, these are our goals and these are our business goals. So when strategy is deployed correctly and you have that type of culture or two with your executives, they're all on the same page. So you can have very calm tradeoffs

talks about are we going to do, you know, strategic intent one or two. If we do this, then we don't get that. Are we okay with that? And it's, it's not emotional, right? It's more objective because we're all there together to further business. And a lot of times like people, you know, we complain as product managers about stakeholders, all asking for different things. And that's always going to be the case. There's always going to be a little bit of that. But you typically will get less of that on the team team. because the priorities within each part of the business should be aligned to the overall priorities. And it will be easier to manage and it's easier to push back on why we're not doing one thing

over the other thing because we all know what our goals are. We all know what the company priorities are and we can see why one thing versus the other won't work. So you have these conversations which makes so much sense. Just talk it out. See if everyone's on the same page about your goals, how you think you're going to get to that goal. What do you do with that? Do you usually recommend people throw it into like a Google Doc that everybody's? sits there and just confirms as happy. And is there kind of like a template that you share with people?

Like here's where we're going to fill out by the end of this, say, three month process. Yeah, I think it varies from company to companies. Some companies already have their own template and I'll just use that. I don't try to reinvent the wheel when it doesn't need to be reinvented. But I'll say like the memos that we would write are probably, they're very easy to explain, right? Two pages for me on what's the vision where are we going after. How are we positioned in the market and against competition? to reach that vision, where are we today? Like, what's the current state of our product? What does it actually look like? What are we going to do to get there? Right? Like, what's our priorities? And then I make people prioritize them. So I'm like, if we're going this way, are we solving this problem? What does that mean context-wise? And then what are the outcomes that

we're actually trying to achieve when we get there? And I do that at different levels. So we typically have executive teams writing the strategic intents for the business level. We've got product management leadership, directors, VP, CPO's writing the product initiatives. Usually the CPO's aren't writing them. It's more like director level VP for their scope. Product initiatives are usually very problem oriented around like big problems we can solve for our customers. Like they're meaty. They're usually made up a multiple epics. And then you've got your product teams on the ground floor working with the developers. I use epics are such a nobody everybody doesn't agree on what they are. I call them options.

sometimes do, but it saves the solutions. It's like, what are you going to, what's the solutions you're going to build to actually get into those product initiatives, solve those problems for the users, and then hit those strategic intents. So you could pretty much write a one page or two-pager like that for every one of those levels. And I think that's great. I think the more we rate about these things, the more we talk about it, the more we put it into pros, the better.

And it's not like a product requirements document that's 20 pages. It's like a two-pager just explaining what we're doing and why. And that context we usually throw into Google Docs or a wiki or something like that, link them all together so that you can go from one to the next and then read all the way up the strategy tree. I love that. It's so simple and like not so formulaic that feels like anybody can, the company can do it. And it's not like there's a rigid one way to do a process. Yeah. And I don't think there should be for certain things. You know, I think every company with a lot of these processes and tools and frameworks that we get into, you got to massage it all and make it your own.

And you're going to find things, certain things are going to work for one company that don't work for the other company based on their culture and what they do. But I think the more that we can just write and talk about things, the easier it is for all these different companies to find their way of working. And then you codify that and you deploy that throughout your organization. On the vision piece specifically, it reminds me when I was managing PMs. One of the most common areas of development for them was get better at vision. is always this like, here's an opportunity to get better vision.

And it's always hard to explain exactly what that means and how it looks when they're doing better vision other than just coming up with the incredible idea that we execute on. So maybe very tactically, what's like a form factor you suggest for folks to even lay out a vision? It sounds like you really encourage writing. Is that how you like to think about it? Or do you find storyboards are often greater sketches or anything else? Yeah.

Like when I write out visions, I like writing. I think that to me is probably the easiest way I've seen people lay it out. I've also seen people put together like a great Athena Health when I was in their consulting. We had one team with a fantastic like head of UX and a VP of product who would sit there together. And they made a great like presentation of the vision. But they they mocked up prototypes and what it could be. And it wasn't like it wasn't tested or set. But the visual pieces of that got people really aligned over like.

oh, okay. And the diagrams I find when you can show like how certain things relate to each other, sometimes it does come off in words. So I like a combination. I like a combination of some kind of presentation plus writing. And I think if you do those two things together, it becomes really powerful. But for me and for a lot of people, especially executives I've seen too, sometimes they're more visually oriented. So if you can, you know, grab your UX designer and sit there and sketch out ideas. And it doesn't even have to be like, it doesn't even have to be wireframes, right? It doesn't have to be the end state of the product. It could just be like how customers interact with things or diagrams about the ecosystem and stuff like that. That just

helps to draw a little bit more color on it. But I think those two things kind of go hand in hand. I love that. I find that anytime I have a designer helping me with anything like that, I always look so much smarter because they made it look so much better. Yeah, exactly. Oh, I love it. superpower. It is. And it's just like, it's amazing. But I've seen that in, like, every type of presentation. Like, you bring in a designer to help you with like board slides. And you're like, oh my God, it all makes sense now. Right. Like I could talk over these types of things. Yeah. And you look like a genius. Yeah. And you look like a genius. You're like, damn,

these look real good. And so I think there's just such a joint relationship with any type of presentation or trying to explain like where you're going or what you're want to do. If you can explain it through visuals and with design, it's just going to be so much better for everybody. Yeah. On the vision piece, do you have any just general advice for getting better at vision? I try to think about a lot of, well, there's a couple, couple tips here. One, a vision should be concrete enough where people can picture what it will be in their head. It can't be a fluffy, like, be the backbone of health care, right?

Like, what does that mean? I don't get it. So people need to be able to look at a vision and say, I can see how we're going to, like, I can understand that we're going to get there one day. I don't know how we're going to get there today, but we will find out along the way, right? That's a good vision. It's lofty far enough away where you can't just be like, oh, we build that one thing and we hit it. It's not a lofty enough vision, right?

It should be something that you really want to iterate through and test and try to figure out how to get there. It should not be what you are at today. that's a sign of like you hit the vision already and maybe you're just tweaking and exploiting it, which is totally fine, but that's not really a good vision for the future. I'd say, too, the way that I think through it is like, how are we different? And it's crazy how much, how many visions I've read where nobody actually talks about how they're different. It's like, we're going to be the best.

Be the best. All right. How are you going to do that, right? And I think it's fine while you're formulating a vision. And this is why I personally like writing. I would just literally brain dump in there and be like, well, our competitor A does X, Y, and Z. And we definitely don't want to be like that. So what could we do to be different? We could do this, this and this, right?

And if you just brain dump all those ideas about, you know, what type of value it will bring for your customers, who you want your customers to be, right? Sometimes I don't read about other customers, like future customers or who you want those customers to be in the future. You know, what's, what's, how is the value different than the value you provide today? Is it, is it going to be different or is, or is, or you just doubling down on what you do? The ways that you provide those value. How is it different than your competitors? Why is it better?

Not just being better, but like, why is it better? What's the ways that you're going to win? And then also, I think good visions also say what you don't want to do. I love, 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 because you can easily have a whole team be like, oh, let's just copy what they did over there. I'm learning a ton.

Thank you for sharing all this. This is for me really helpful too. On that topic a little bit, Sapien wants to get better at strategy, which we talked a little bit about. Do you have any advice someone trying to get better at being more strategic and thinking about strategy? Yeah. It was interesting. I was just talking to one of the chief product officers who graduated from my program last year. Now she's the CPO of a company.

And I said, what was your advice for especially people who are not chief product officers yet or ICs? Because I hear from a lot of people, you know, I'm not getting the opportunity to work on strategy. And I loved her advice because she said, you know, even when I didn't have that role or responsibility or that scope, I sat there and I still imagined what. I would do if I was in their position. And I think that's powerful. You know, pretend to the CPU, would you do something different? What would you do? Can you dig into the data?

Can you ask questions? Can you get into there? And I'm not saying, like, go reinvent the wheel for the company, but it's going to give you reps, right? It's going to give you the experience asking those questions. So I think that's powerful, picturing what you would do in their scenario. If you want to get better at strategy, talk to people who really understand the market, really understand the financials.

I'd go talk to your chief product officer if you have one and just ask them like, what's your process? How do you set this? Right? Like we got to these three priorities or something like, how'd you get there? What'd you look at? I think that's important just having conversations with people about what their thought process is, how they analyzed it, what that means.

I think that's really important. When you get into setting a strategy at higher levels for product, a lot of it has to do with the market and the customers and the financials and things that we don't get exposed to as much as a team-level product manager. So the more you can talk to people in other disciplines, go have conversation with sales and see why people are buying competitors. Like, what was your win-loss analysis? Why are we losing?

What do you think is the issue? A lot of times we just don't go and talk to other departments and they have a wealth of knowledge. And we've got subject matter experts sitting in certain places that can fill you in on how the market's moving and what things are happening there and how people are innovating. And it is fascinating.

to talk to those people. So I would do that. I would talk to other departments. I would talk to your leadership, try to understand their thought process. If you are a leader in trying to figure out how to do a lot of this, one of the biggest issues I see for leaders and why I got very excited about product operations over the last couple years is the lack of data. One issue I see is that leaders have never really set strategy before. So they get into these positions and they don't know where to start. And the place that you need to start is data from everywhere. You need to start with internal data and you need to have an analyst on your team. I also tell them hire a data analyst, hire somebody, some ex-McKinsey consultants. Like people are, they're great at crunching data.

I had them on my team. It's amazing. But they'll pull the numbers out. They'll find interesting patterns for you. And you say, I want to answer these questions and they will go get the data for you. Put it into ways that you can actually look at it. And then you can start making informed decisions. So you want to take that data. You want to take that data. You want to to take customer research. So whoever's talking to customers, you want to bubble that up and make sure that you can see that as well. You want to take the company goals and put that into context. And then really strategy always comes down to asking the questions about like how can we win, how can we get further to the goal, which is the vision, right? But it's also keeping it into context

of where we are now and what we're able to execute on now. And I think it's interesting because it's like we don't always make the right choice when it comes to strategy. but you got to make a choice. And I think that's the hardest part for some people. They're like, I want to be 100% certain this is going to work. And you can't. And I think a good aspect of being a leader, whether you're a product manager or a team or even an executive, is making the best informed decision that you possibly can at the time.

But then also being willing to correct yourself if you find out it's the wrong one by looking at all the information and then saying, okay, let's try something different. And that to me is how we do great strategy, right? Like we take all the information we can. We make the best possible guess to go in one direction. And then we just keep reevaluating it to make sure it's the right direction. And if it's not, we pivot. I love that your answer is talking to people getting information, gathering data thinking.

And it's not go read books on strategy. You go get an MBA or anything like that. It's you get better by doing it and learning from other people. Right. Yeah. And seeing it, too, like for me, when I'm learning about strategy, right, because it's not like I just, you know, start product management and start doing the strategy immediately. I analyzed how other companies did it? So I was like, how did Netflix do their strategy?

How did this company do their strategy? In reading how a company goes from point A to point B, it's fascinating. There's tons of articles on there about how companies have done it. But it just helps you see that everybody does it differently. Everybody's got a different framework. It doesn't matter what framework you use as long as it works for your company. But they all got to that framework by asking those questions and looking at the data and deeply understand the market and deeply understand their customers and just trying to piece it all together. Awesome.

You touched on product operations, which you know is the book that you're working on now. I know that there's a role, an emerging role product operations. Can you kind of give us a preview of what this book's going to be about and what people should be thinking about there? Yeah. So having worked with all these companies, especially. the ones that are scaling pretty rapidly, I started realizing like, hey, we train all the teams, we deployed the strategy, we've got a bunch of people now in this product management role, and then you look at certain things and you realize it just didn't scale to the rest of the team.

And things broke down. Like one, standardization of processes. Everybody have a different roadmap. Cool. I can't do anything with that one. I'm trying to set a strategy. Like if I can't compare your roadmap to that roadmap, all your time horizons are off, all your data is off, nothing's like, you know, set in the right format.

I can't roll that up into my strategy as product leader. Two, maybe there's no career ladders for the product managers. Three, we're having like 18 different types of meetings and all the wrong people are in the room. Product managers can get the data that they need to make the informed decisions on the product strategy. We're interviewing customers one off and then I find out like, you know, the same team is hitting up all these customers over here again. They're getting really upset. These customers don't want to talk to the same team over and over and over and

again. 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 and those check-ins to make sure that you're on track for the right strategy. So there's usually three parts to it that I say and not all companies have all three. And it depends where you're at for where you want to start with this. But typically we have internal data and insights. And that's a team that's going in and taking all the data that we have. that lives in our financial systems, our, you know, our user analytics, all of these different

things that live inside our company. And they're helping to surfaces up in ways that people can look at them, see the progress of our strategy and track those OKRs and say, okay, we're going to go this way or that way. So that helps give us the inputs we need for strategy, helps monitor the strategy, and it helps us make decisions. Then there's also customer research and user insights. So that's really the external data in market research, customer insights and market research. So that's like the external data that doesn't live in our company that we need to get from our customers or our market to help inform strategy. So from a market research perspective, that might mean, you know, having subscriptions to publications or making sure that we have like subject matter experts who are giving us great advice where the market's moving. But then also for customer research, it's like standardizing the approach so that product managers can go talk to customers.

So we're not hitting up the same person a little time. We're recording all the user interviews we do in a way where we can actually search. through it and, you know, gain that information leader and go and revisit those things. It's really helping to streamline it. It's not centralizing user research as a practice. It's helping to scale user research so that we can enable more people to do user research, especially when you get into some of these companies. Like when I first started doing this, it was at Athena Health and we had 350 product managers and we had to make sure they weren't bothering the people at the same hospital over and over and over again because they were

when we came in. And we said, wow, okay, cool. We've asked these people now the same question 10 times from 10 different teams. Like, how do we make sure that those things don't happen? But how do we also empower those product managers to go still talk to them when they need to? So we're not taking user research away. We're just helping make it more scalable, more efficient, give them more tools for it. And then the last one is really standardizing your like processes or cadences for strategy check-in. So it's like, hey, we do roadmap check-ins every month. These are the three. people that need to be in the room. We do, you know, quarterly planning sessions with executives, and this is the inputs to it, this is the outputs to it, here's the decisions we make in this

meeting, this is what we review. And those people can help do that part and then help standardize the product management processes that touch other divisions. So for instance, like, if I need to update roadmaps to sales, like they will help, you know, own that cadence of what that looks like and how those formats go out. But what I say is it doesn't standardize stuff that only belongs to a team. Like I don't care how a team does their standups. Like you choose how to do that. I'm not going to standardize that. But I do care what format your roadmap comes in. I do care how we make sure that we have a good working relationship with sales. I do care that we have a good working relationship with product marketing, those types of functions. That's kind of the interactions

that we want to standardize. I can't wait to read this book. When do you think it'll be coming out? We're aiming to get it out before the end of the year. Oh, wow. Okay. That's pretty soon. I know. It's coming out. Kind of on that topic, as a PM, trying to learn, trying to get better, there's so much information out there.

There's books, newsletters, guilty of that, tweets, advice, podcast, all these things that are always coming at you as a PM. And I hear a lot from PM that are just, like, burnt out by all of the information, always coming at them. And it's just like never-ending advice. do you have any advice for either new pms or just any p.m. of just like how to take in knowledge that's all out there and not just kind of burn out. I'm going to burn them out with more advice. What's my advice about the advice? This is all the only advice they'll need.

So I'd say one, the best thing that you could possibly do as a product manager, even if you're, you've been in this role for a while, is to make sure that you're always learning. but the way that you're going to learn the most usually is from execution. So what I'd say is first focus on that, focus on doing your job every day. Then I would analyze your job and say, what's working, what's not working. And then take out certain pieces of it that you want to get better at and then do a deep dive into that. So like for me, what I was thinking about, you know, my career and my stuff, I did a similar approach where I just run into problems and I'm like, I need to learn more about like why that problem is causing this. So if, you know, one of them was like agile.

Like I found out that a bunch of people who never did product management before became product owners. They were writing like 8,000 user stories for like very small little features. I'm like, why are you writing so many user stories? So I went down like a rabbit hole interviewing everybody who wrote the Agile Manifesto and did scrum and taught all those things to find out like where this came from. So then I could figure out how to fix it. And I think you need to carve stuff out like that where you go, what's this type? topic I want to get better at. What's this going to do to help me get to the next level? Where do I need to learn and help fill in my skill gaps? So, for instance, if you're not great at user

research or you haven't had a lot of experience talking to customers, I might deep dive on that. If you're not great at data analytics, I would deep dive on that. But I think there's, you know, there's a certain point where we get to, okay, I understand the basic product framework. And everybody's going to have different opinions about what that framework should look like. But we all generally agree at the end of the day, like you should be talking to your users, you should be working with your teams to develop what that, you know, what a test should be, run some tests, figure out what your users want, build it with your team in an iterative fashion, measure success and keep going from there. That all generally stays the same, but how you do each part of that, you're going to find some people

have one opinion, some people don't. And you have to find something that works for you and then stick with it and find out that if it doesn't work for you, change it. And this is where I get really passionate and frustrated with agile processes, which I used to rant about a lot, but I feel like some places we've solved this problem, some places we haven't. But I try to tell teams that started with scrum or started with some of these more dogmatic processes, if it doesn't serve you, move on, change it, right? Everything's meant to be iterated on. Everything's meant to be adapted.

If it does not work for you, you do not have to keep doing it. And I think that's 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, change it, right? Change your approach. Do something different. If it is, keep it. Keep it in your toolbox, right?

Create your own toolbox and go from there. What a perfect way to end our conversation. Where can folks find you online and how can listeners be helpful to you? Yeah. I am on Twitter all the time at Lissy Jean, L-I-S-S-I-J-E-A-N. So feel free to tweet with me. I love hearing what you guys are up to. You can also submit questions if you have questions to me at the Product Thinking Podcast.

So if you go to Productthinkingpodcast.com or Dear Melissa.com, I take questions there all the time. I'm always curious what everybody's thinking about. What are your questions? What are your burning questions? That's how you can help me. I am just very passionate about figuring out, like, what are the problems that we're facing as product managers? And that's what makes me happy trying to figure out where they're coming from. How do we solve it?

What's on people's mind? So definitely hit me up with questions. I always answer them on the podcast. And then my website, Melissa Perry.com, has all my other information if anybody needs to get in touch. Amazing. If anyone has any problems in their PM job, just tweet you and they will get an answer is what you're saying. Yes. Do that.

Amazing. Thank you so much, Melissa. Thank you. That was awesome. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed the chat, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast, and even better, leave a review, which helps a lot. You can also learn more at Lenny'spodcast.com. I'll see you in the next episode.