Podcasts about build trap

Welcome to another episode of Supra Insider. This time, Marc and Ben sat down with Melissa Perri, author of Escaping the Build Trap and one of the world's leading product strategy experts. Melissa shares lessons from advising CEOs, founders, and product leaders on how to build strategy that works, scale from VP to CPO, and navigate the often tricky dynamic between founder-CEOs and product leaders. They also explore how AI is shifting product management and why the fundamentals still matter more than ever. Whether you're a founder, product leader, or operator, this conversation is packed with practical advice on how to step up as your company grows.All episodes of the podcast are also available on Spotify, Apple and YouTube.New to the pod? Subscribe below to get the next episode in your inbox

Yoann Benoit expert Data, IA et Produit, est le fondateur d'Hymaïa, l'agence spécialisée dans la Data, l'IA et le Produit. Aujourd'hui ils travaillent avec des grosses boîtes comme Pernod Ricard mais aussi avec des boîtes Tech comme Leboncoin.On aborde :

From Intel's engineering labs to Silicon Valley's unicorns, OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) have transformed how tech companies translate vision into measurable outcomes. But what separates successful OKR implementations from failed experiments? And how can technology leaders avoid the common pitfalls that derail even well-intentioned rollouts? In this episode, we dive deep with leaders who've shaped OKR practices at some of tech's most influential companies. Our guests Josh Seiden, Holly Bielawa, and Deepika Yerragunta share battle-tested insights from their experiences at Intel, Amazon, Google, and beyond. The episode compiles the best segments around getting started on your OKR journey, de-risking and iterating your rollout, and our guests' tips on self-checking the health of your OKR implementation.  Whether you're launching your first OKR initiative or iterating on an existing framework, you'll learn practical strategies for cascading objectives across teams while maintaining strategic alignment. Our conversation includes war stories from the field, as well as intuitive insights on what actually works: fostering genuine collaboration, maintaining human centricity, and achieving the elusive balance between ambition and accountability.  Watch full episodes with Josh, Holly and Deepika here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL31JETR9AR0FGx2A9HQbq2e1Xywkqb6BQ     Inside the episode... Why OKRs are a powerful alternative to traditional goal-setting frameworks. How OKRs promote collaboration and alignment across all levels of an organization. Best practices for implementing OKRs: starting small, iterating, and setting clear priorities. Tips for integrating OKRs into your product teams using human-centered design principles. Differentiating between business OKRs and product OKRs to avoid organizational misalignment. How to set and measure strategic objectives with actionable, customer-centric key results. Lessons learned from failed and successful OKR implementations, including war stories from the field. The role of product operations in making data accessible for measuring OKR progress. Why tying OKRs to compensation or promotions can derail the intent of the framework.     Mentioned in this episode Measure What Matters by John Doerr Outcomes Over Outputs by Josh Seiden Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres Who Does What by When by by Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton     Convergence Episodes featured  Building Customer-Centric Teams: Josh Seiden on OKRs and Agile Agile and Beyond Conference 2024: The Latest in A.I. Innovations and Product Development Strategies (features the interview with Holly Bielawa) Driving Cultural Change: PepsiCo's Deepika Yerragunta on Customer Obsession and Product Mindset Unlock the full potential of your product team with Integral's player coaches, experts in lean, human-centered design. Visit integral.io/convergence for a free Product Success Lab workshop to gain clarity and confidence in tackling any product design or engineering challenge. Subscribe to the Convergence podcast wherever you get podcasts including video episodes to get updated on the other crucial conversations that we'll post on YouTube at youtube.com/@convergencefmpodcast Learn something? Give us a 5 star review and like the podcast on YouTube. It's how we grow.   Follow the Pod Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/convergence-podcast/ X: https://twitter.com/podconvergence Instagram: @podconvergence  

Melissa Perri is the founder of Product Institute, author of Escaping the Build Trap, and host of the Product Thinking Podcast. She has worked with startups, Fortune 50 companies, and everything in between to help them build better products and level up their product teams. In our conversation, we discuss:• The history of the product owner role• The differences between product owners and product managers• How to transition from product owner to product manager• The evolution of and problems with the SAFe framework• How large non-tech companies can improve their product practices• Much more—Brought to you by:• Pendo—The only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application• OneSchema—Import CSV data 10x faster• Coda—The all-in-one collaborative workspace—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/product-owners-melissa-perri—Where to find Melissa Perri:• X: https://twitter.com/lissijean• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissajeanperri/• Website: https://melissaperri.com/• Product Institute: https://productinstitute.com/• Podcast: https://www.produxlabs.com/product-thinking—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Melissa's background(02:12) The rise of the product owner role(06:37) Understanding Agile and Scrum(08:27) Challenges in Agile transformations(10:41) The history of the product owner role(13:58) The Scrum Guide(15:43) Product owner responsibilities(21:01) Adopting Scrum in organizations(26:21) The origins and implementation of SAFe(35:20) Why Melissa doesn't recommend SAFe(40:33) Advice for implementing a digital transformation(49:12) An example of SAFe adoption(51:27) The value of experienced product leaders(56:53) Career paths for product owners(01:04:14) Transitioning from product owner to product manager(01:06:41) Be careful relying on certifications(01:11:43) Evaluating existing product owners(01:16:55) Final thoughts on Agile and product management—Referenced:• Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value: https://www.amazon.com/Escaping-Build-Trap-Effective-Management/dp/149197379X• Lean UX: https://leanuxnyc.co/• Scrum: https://www.scrum.org/• What is Extreme Programming? https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/xp/• Capital One: https://www.capitalone.com/• The Agile Manifesto: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/manifesto• Ken Schwaber on X: https://x.com/kschwaber• Jeff Sutherland on X: https://x.com/jeffsutherland• Kanban: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/kanban• What is a kanban board?: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/kanban/boards• Ron Jeffries's website: https://www.ronjeffries.com/• Jeff Patton on X: https://x.com/jeffpatton• The Scrum Guide: https://www.scrum.org/resources/scrum-guide• OpenSky: https://www.openskycc.com/• SAFe: https://scaledagileframework.com/• Dean Leffingwell on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deanleffingwell/• Capital One scraps 1,100 tech positions: https://www.reuters.com/technology/capital-one-scraps-1100-tech-positions-source-2023-01-19/• Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/product-management-theater-marty• Marty Cagan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cagan/• Jeff Gothelf on X: https://x.com/jboogie• Shruti Patel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shruti-patel-32bb573a/• Product Thinking Podcast: Mastering Product Focus: Balancing Legacy and Innovation with Shruti Patel: https://www.produxlabs.com/product-thinking-blog/2024/9/25/episode-190-mastering-product-focus-balancing-legacy-and-innovation-with-shruti-patel• Melissa Douros on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissadouros/• Mind the Product: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/• Athenahealth: https://www.athenahealth.com/• McKinsey: https://www.mckinsey.com/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

My guest today is Melissa Perri.Melissa is the author of the bestselling book "Escaping the Build Trap" and recently co-authored “Product Operations: How successful companies build better products at scale”.She runs a successful CPO Accelerator, is a former professor at Harvard Business School, serves on several Boards, and is the Founder of Product Institute.In this conversation, we explore:* The role of Product Ops* The main misconceptions with Product Ops* The 3 key pillars of Product Ops* How do you get started and how to scale the team* How Product Ops support Product Teams and Product Leaders* Product Ops as an enabling teams and how to measure its success* The most important skills in a CPO* What most CPOs struggle with and why* And more!—Where to find Melissa Perri:• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissajeanperri/• Product Institute Website—

Jenny Wanger is a product consultant and coach who loves to educate PMs around the world and is doing just that with her product operations course on Reforge. Her hot take? Product leaders send their teams off for training but then don't do anything when they come back, and nothing changes. This leads them to question the value of the training, but it's almost never the quality of the training that's at fault, it's what they (don't) do with it. Find Jenny on LinkedIn and remember to check out her course on Reforge. If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time! Related episodes you should like: The Role of Product Management on Truly Agile Development Teams (Allen Holub, Software Architect, Consultant & Outspoken Twitter Agilist) Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude) Escaping the Build Trap with Product Operations and Strong CPOs (Melissa Perri, Product Management Leader, Educator & Author "Escaping the Build Trap") OKRs: The Gateway Drug to Agility & Good Product Management (Jeff Gothelf, Product Management Consultant & Co-author "Lean UX" ) The Five Dysfunctions of Product Management Teams (Saeed Khan, Founder @ Transformation Labs) Going Beyond the Dreaded Product Demo and Creating the Perfect Sales Pitch (April Dunford, Author "Obviously Awesome" and "Sales Pitch") Enabling Strategic Product Decisions through Product Operations and Portfolio Management (Becky Flint, CEO of Dragonboat) Transforming your Organisation to the Product Operating Model (Marty Cagan, Author "Inspired", "Empowered" and "Transformed")

This week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, we're putting the ‘people' back into People Development and the ‘human' back into ‘Human Resources, as we explore Natal Dank's book Agile L&D.   Natal is the co-owner and director of PXO Culture, a consultancy firm on a mission to make HR, culture and change about humans.  And her book, Agile L&D, is a follow-up to Agile HR.   We discuss:  Problems with a ‘traditional' approach to L&D  Tools and methods for prioritizing and organizing workloads  Whether ‘agile' has just become another corporate buzzword  To find out more about Natal, and the book, visit pxoculture.com  During the discussion, Natal referenced the books The Build Trap by Melissa Perri and Embracing Uncertainty by Margaret Heffernan.  For more on Taylorism, see ‘scientific management'.  In ‘What I Learned This Week', Ross Garner discussed Yuval Noah Harari's bleak take on the future of AI and government.  Nahdia discussed digital twins.  Natal discussed Meditations for Mortals.  For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtools.com/business. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.    Or become a member to support our show! Visit mindtools.com and use the offer code PODCAST15 for 15% off an individual subscription. This offer is for new subscribers only and can't be used with any other offer.   Connect with our speakers     If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:  Ross Garner  Nahdia Khan  Natal Dank 

Bio Denise Tilles wrote the recently published book Product Operations. Co-authored with Escaping the Build Trap's Melissa Perri, the book is the must-read guide technology leaders have been missing.  With over a decade of product leadership experience, Denise supports companies like Bloomberg, Sam's Club, and athenahealth by strengthening capabilities around: Product Operations, Product Strategy, and establishing a Product Operating Model.     Interview Highlights 01:00 Background and beginnings 04:00 Product Operations: The book 06:30 Product Operations vs Product Management 07:30 The Three Pillars of Product Operations 08:30 Using Product Operations to Scale 10:20 Leading and Lagging Indicators 12:20 Product Operations in Startups  21:10 Generative AI     Social Media ·         www.denisetilles.com ·         Denise Tilles on Twitter X ·         Denise Tilles on LinkedIn ·         Grocket     Books & Resources ·         Product Operations: How successful companies build better products at scale: Melissa Perri, Denise Tilles ·         Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value, Melissa Perri ·         MasterClass with Denise Tilles: Getting Started with Product Operations — Produx Labs ·         Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value, Terese Torres ·         Lenny's podcast: Lenny's Podcast (lennyspodcast.com) ·         Lenny's Newsletter: Lenny's Newsletter | Lenny Rachitsky | Substack (lennysnewsletter.com) ·         Pivot podcast: Vox Media: Podcast Network | Pivot ·         Melissa Perri's podcast: Product Thinking — Produx Labs     Episode Transcript Intro:  Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.   Ula Ojiaku   So I have with me here, Denise Tilles, who is the Founder and CPO of Product Consultancy Grocket. She is also a co-author of the book Product Operations, How Successful Companies Build Better Products at Scale. Thank you so much, Denise, for making the time for this conversation. I've been looking forward to this.   Denise Tilles   Thank you. Me too.    Ula Ojiaku   Awesome. So who is Denise, so can you tell us how you've evolved to the Denise we are seeing today?   Denise Tilles   Yeah. So, I have been in product management for probably 12 years now, both on the operating side, as an individual contributor, and then as a leader, working with companies like B2B SaaS companies, Cision, and a media company, Condé Nast. And then for the past two-ish years, I've been a product consultant and working with really great companies like Bloomberg and Sam's Club, Walmart, we're helping them with product maturity assessments, product operations in terms of like, does this make sense for a company? How do we stand it up? What is sort of day one look like, you know, day 366 and then so on, sort of building it to scale. And then also co-authoring this book with Melissa Perri, the Product Operations book, and as we talk about the book, folks, I think naturally might say, well, why you, why should you be writing about the book? I have experience with product operations before we really knew that's what it was called, and I mentioned this in the book that I was working at this B2B SaaS and I had just started and my manager, the SVP said, hey, maybe we should get some people to think about managing the data, maybe thinking about understanding what kinds of experiments we should be doing. I'm like, we can do that, well, wow, yes, that sounds amazing. And we were going to hire an individual contributor, we ended up hiring this amazing VP level person, and then she built a small team, and it really was a great compliment to the product, I had a product team of about 10 folks globally and really great compliment, because they understood the product, but they weren't so close to it that they were myopic in terms of seeing what the potential opportunities or challenges were with the data, so they became a great partner and sort of highlighting here's what we're looking at for the month, X shows us maybe there's a challenge with the funnel, maybe we could do some experiments, maybe tests, and anyway, they had uncovered a potential opportunity. It was this sort of add on product and we ended up making a million dollars the first year, it wasn't even sort of like an advertised product, it was kind of just back pocket offering for clients. So after that, I was like, wow, this is great, I love this, and didn't really know that was product operations. Fast forward a couple of years later, I start working with Melissa Perri at her consultancy Produx Labs, she mentions product operations, I'm like, what's that? And she explains it, I'm like, oh, that's what we were doing, cool. And then really started to dig in more about the theoretical aspect and understanding what it could look like to build it at a scale and helping companies at the scale up stage with a venture capital company we were working with, think about what that looks like for them, and does it make sense to implement? So that's when I really got interested and excited about it, sort of having lived it and then seeing the potential opportunity of the sort of force multiplier it could be. So I was working with Melissa and in 2021, I slacked her and I'm like, what do you think, I'm thinking about writing a book about product operations, I don't think anyone's written this yet and I can't believe it. She's like, yeah, great idea. I'm like, would you like to do it with me? And she was like, yes, I'll do it. She hesitated a little bit because I heard her speaking about her first book, Escaping the Build Trap, and she's like, never, nope, done.  But she's like, well, maybe it'll be different writing it with somebody. So I'm like, how long does it take? She goes, I don't know, as long as it needs to take, maybe a year, two and a half years. So we kept each other honest and it was, I don't know any other way of writing a book, but it was really great to have a partner and like, I've hit a wall here, can you pick this up? Or I map this out, like, here, does this make sense to you? And challenges, wins, whatever, just having someone to feed off of was really great. And it was just a lot of fun to do. So it was really a great excitement and relief to have it published in October of 2023.   Ula Ojiaku   Congratulations, that's a massive achievement, and I couldn't help wondering when you were talking about co-authoring the book with Melissa, whether you applied some of the product operations concepts in getting your book done?    Denise Tilles   That's a great question, we had a lot of qualitative inputs. We had peer reviews from folks that were from like a CPO, Chief Product Officer, all the way to an individual contributor, kind of brand new Product Manager, and the questions that they raised were totally different. So it was really great to sort of get those inputs and balance and think about like, who's the archetype we're creating this book for? And I sort of ignore my own advice when I work with product people, like if you try to serve everybody, you serve no one, but we really were trying to think about like, this could be a book that a product person could hand to their CEO. This is the power, here's some great case studies. Or the individual contributor thinking, I've heard about this. What is this? Would this help our company? So we really wanted to, you know, as well as Chief Product Officers, VPs thinking like, I've heard about this, what does that look like? So that was an important aspect.    Ula Ojiaku     Makes perfect sense. Now I know that some of the viewers or listeners would be wondering, then, we might as well cut to the chase, what exactly is Product Operations? Most of us are conversant with the term Product Management, what is Product Operations and how is it, if it is, different from Product Management, please?   Denise Tilles   Yeah, great question. That was one of the most common questions, that was another reason we wanted to write the book, because we just kept getting the same questions like, here's a book. Product Operations just so quickly put is really increasing the speed and accuracy and quality of decision making, right? It's about surrounding your Product Managers with all of the inputs they need to make really, truly informed decisions. It's about supporting them to execute on the things you hired them for - building value, growing revenue, and not necessarily writing SQL scripts, because at the end of the year, it's like, well, I wrote 10 of those. Great, but you didn't deliver X product, who won, so that's a big piece of it. And the way that we think about Product Operations, it's really three pillars. So business and data insights, which is the quantitative, right? Customer and market insights, the qualitative. And then the third one is the operating model, sort of process and practices, and we like to think of it that way and sort of broke the book up like that as well, to sort of like focus on that, each section and at the end of each pillar, it's like three things to get you started today. If there was like three things to do, and one other aspect of it is that we think about how to implement it, and that's a question that we get a lot. And as we mentioned at the beginning of the book, don't try to do all three pillars, figure out where the biggest challenge and opportunities are, start there and build out. Some companies I've worked with have just stuck with one of those pillars and that's good enough for them. It really looks different everywhere. This is just what it could look like.    Ula Ojiaku   No, that makes sense, and I know that in your book you also talked about, really how Product Operations can help with solving many of the scaling issues companies face right now, because it seems like if we're to go into the agile world, there are some purists or fundamentalists who feel like, oh, it's everything is agile, you know, forget about the money and everything, you just apply agile and everything is all right. But at the end of the day, if you're a for profit business or even if you're not, you have customers, and customers define the value and the only way you stay afloat is you're delivering the value, not that you're following a framework. So could you talk a bit more about how Product Operations can help with companies with, for example, connecting financial metrics to the delivery?    Denise Tilles   That's great. It's really about having all of those inputs available so Product Managers can make the informed decisions, and a lot of companies we have talked to and interviewed with, they tend to look at more of the product metrics, engagement, usage, time spent, but not necessarily the financial and that's a huge miss, right? And that's one area we really hammer home in the book, is making sure that you look at all data and not just your product. You want to make sure you're looking at that, but the financials typically are lagging indicators, but so important, right? And if you're doing all this great stuff and seeing engagement, but the revenue is going down, who cares, right? So if you have all of those together, it's a powerful sort of breadcrumb to understand your product health and sort of the leverage you're pulling and whether you're, you know, doing any harm or hopefully doing good. So yeah, that would be one key takeaway.  Ula Ojiaku  You mentioned financials, for example, revenue and all that, it's a lagging metric, and there is this innovation, accounting body of knowledge that talks about using leading indicators. With the multiple organisations and teams that you've worked with, are you able to, off the top of your head, share examples, maybe give us an example of where a financial metric is tied to hopefully a leading indicator so that you can see, based on the data you're getting right now, to be able to predict how likely we are to hit the financial targets?  Denise Tilles Contract sign can certainly be sort of a leading right indicator, so you're not recognising that revenue yet, but at least it's commitment. Pipeline sometimes can be at least a good indicator. If you've got a nice, robust pipeline and you're comparing it year over year, that's your baseline, that is another indicator. So there's a number of them there, contract value, yield, how much they're purchasing. So there's a lot of indicators, especially with yield. It's like if they were buying seven different product lines and spending, let's say 20 million dollars, I'm making that up, let's say this year they're doing only five product lines, but they're spending 25. What does that mean? Why did they drop those? Where are they spending more money? So there's so much in there that you can be analysing and helping inform what you're doing as a product person.  Ula Ojiaku Thanks for that, Denise. And how would you, because in your story earlier on in this conversation, you mentioned you had your team, your product team of about 10 people globally, and someone at a VP level was brought in and seemed to be providing that complimentary set of services. Now, in your book, you give the readers ideas of how they might want to start off, depending on what is their bottleneck, these are my words, not yours, about how to start implementing Product Operations if they don't have that. Now, imagine I'm in a large complex organisation, we have Product Managers. How would you advise the leader of that organisation to go about structuring this?  Denise Tilles Right. That's a great question, and earlier you asked a really good question that I didn't get to, which I'd like to talk about now that will lead into that. You asked what the difference is between Product Managers and Product Operations folks. The difference is Product Managers make the decisions, Product Operations enables those decisions. It's as simple as that. It's the enablement. If you have buy in, and one of my clients at Sam's Club, amazingly the CPO was like, here's what Product Operations is, here's the value it can bring my team of hundreds of Product Managers. The CEO was like, cool, sounds great, let's do it. It's rarely that easy. And like, let's build a team out of the gate, it's rarely that easy. A lot of times I'll see companies where there's someone interested and they might do a little bit in their quote unquote spare time and then maybe speak to their manager and say, hey, I'm really interested in this enablement piece, could I divide my current role, from maybe 50% products, 50% product or, and then try to get the quick wins to sort of prove the value. And then does it look like this person moves into that role full time? That's how Christine Itwaru from Pendo, she was at Pendo and started Product Operations there, she was a Product Manager, but saw the pains and started trying to solve it for her team, but thought, oh, this could be really interesting to solve for the whole company, I think I want to do that. So she built an entire team, but made the case for that, so that's one way to do it. You can think about making the case for an entire team, partial, existing resource, or maybe starting with a team of one, deciding what's above the line in terms of what's included that this person can include, what's below the line that they're not going to be able to do, and being very intentional about that, and then starting to build out the capability and showing the value hopefully where they could bring on more people if needed.  Ula Ojiaku Thanks for that. So to go back to the three pillars that you mentioned, there is the data and insights, customer and market insights, and the process and governance. Now of the three pillars, which one would you say is fundamental? Are they like a three legged stool?  Denise Tilles I mean, they all sort of work together, but if you can only cover one of them, great. If you only had the need for one of them, great, and companies really differ. In my experience it was like, oh, everyone really is challenged in the data and the business and data insights. Not always. I teach a masterclass for Produx Labs and it's a small group, like 25 people, and before we do, it's a four hour course that we offer quarterly, live on zoom, thinking about how we want to do that and it's really about thinking there's a said value, is this really where we want to go? And a lot of companies don't have that challenge. They may have more capability needs with the qualitative, and that's an area I see that kind of gets ignored or they're like, oh, we have a UX research team, but it doesn't have to originate with Product Operations, it's just about harnessing it and making sure that the Product Managers understand how to access it, how to apply it, and maybe even creating an insights database, could be something that UX research has, great, let's make sure that the Product Managers are aware of that. And the process piece, we've seen sort of hybrid structures where we've got a couple of dedicated people within the quantitative and qualitative, the business insights and customer market insights, and then more of a horizontal across the teams for the more process. So that was an organisational strategy that Blake Samic employed at Uber and Stripe when he set those teams up, thinking about more tactical support where needed, and then more of a horizontal type of program. Ula Ojiaku Thank you. So another thing I'd like to know, because looking at the title of the book, the second half says How Successful Companies Build Better Products at Scale. So does it mean that if I'm a startup, I shouldn't be bothering myself with Product Operations? Denise Tilles Not necessarily. There's one company I can think of that is probably in a series A, maybe a B, and they have a Product Operations person. So you can decide if you've got the resourcing for it, that you dedicate one person, but typically we see Product Operations more with the sort of scale up in enterprise levels. Ula Ojiaku Okay, because typically a Product Manager has a mishmash of all roles and different hats, it's like you're developing the roadmap, you're speaking with the customers, you're making sure that the implementation is going on track, but it seems like it's more about teasing out the operations part and the enablement part and leaving them to focus on the pure product. I'm just trying to get my head around the concept because it's a really interesting thing. Denise Tilles Yeah, we make the point in the book that Product Managers are being asked to do evermore, like be strategic, be tactical, focus on delivery, make sure that you're a great partner with cross functional, apply data, oh, you don't have data, well do it, make sure you learn SQL to pull out the data. So there's just so many things, and you think about it, There's something's going to slip, right? So it ends up being, we have to deliver, but are we delivering right things? Are we delivering as much value as we could be doing? And that's typically where the drop off is - we're delivering, but is it the right type of work to really move the needle? I mean, that's sort of what Escaping The Build Trap talks about, Melissa's first book, but Product Operations helps make sure that we are focusing on the right things and delivering the right things. Ula Ojiaku So what does it look like when Product Operations is operating, in your and Melissa's opinion, as it should be? What could the organisation look like? What would you describe as a day in the life of a well-oiled Product Operations machine? Denise Tilles Oh, that's a good question. I mean, ideally, if I could have anything I wanted, I'd have a few folks thinking about that sort of hybrid model, right? So sort of a horizontal across all of the different teams and verticals, someone thinking about what are the methods, what sort of the systems design we need, not just for the sake of it, but making things easier. This was a challenge that I see a lot where companies and Product Managers spend so much time talking about doing the work rather than doing the work. How do we get rid of that? How can we clear that out, so everyone's aligned, and is there a template we're using for roadmaps, that's always a challenge, great, here we go, people are not usually that wound up about how it should look, just tell me what you want and I'll go, and there's a lot of sort of cycles burned and wasted on things like that. So it's just about helping people understand the rules of engagement and can get going with doing work of value versus talking about it. And then I think in terms of the hybrid and having more dedicated folks, I would love to see maybe a person more focused on data analysis, ideally with each VP, maybe, and I've seen that, or supporting as much as they can, and also that person being able to sort of harness in the qualitative as well to make sure that the Product Managers have a full view of that. So that would be where I would start, but if you can start with a team of one, get a few quick wins and then build out, I think that's what you could get to, but in terms of starting out, I think it would be a team of one understanding where the opportunities are, building out a roadmap, proving those out, and then sort of making yourself redundant in areas that could be automated, moving on to higher value work and so on and so on. Ula Ojiaku So you know that right now AI seems to have come to the forefront of the news with OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT and lots of courses there. So, when you mentioned automating those things that can be automated, it kind of triggered this question. So what are your thoughts on how generative AI could help with making Product Operations smoother? Denise Tilles Yeah. I would think around comms, right? So if we've got release notes that, perhaps Product Operations has put into more, what's in it for me as a salesperson, that's great, the GR521 release, but what does that mean to me? So let's assume that Product Operations has sort of put that into the ‘so what' for the entire organisation, let's say they do this three times a month, you know, maybe you'd be able to use ChatGPT and keep sort of feeding those in and being able to create a digest that could come out and be updated each, however you want, or someone could request that on demand, that would be one way of doing it, in implementing AI. It's interesting you mentioned OpenAI because one of the people we talked to is leading Product Operations at OpenAI, Blake Samic, who introduced Stripe and Uber. So they believe in Product Operations, and in spite of them thinking about building these wonderful tools for all of us, and people think, oh, they're going to replace Product Managers, or, it's not, it's more of a supplement and an enablement type of tool. I haven't seen a lot to really think, oh, wow, that's absolutely revolutionary yet, doesn't mean that's not the case, but I think in terms of what I'm seeing right now, it's still people thinking about manually creating those baselines and then automating data, not necessarily through AI. Any thoughts on your part, where that might sort of play in with AI? Ula Ojiaku So on the Product Management side, I can see that you can use it as your enthusiastic chief kind of researcher, guide, or someone you're bouncing ideas off to kind of produce a first draft of maybe the vision and all that. From an Operations perspective, you would be the experts here, but I'm thinking again, if it's about the processes, then are there things that are repetitive? You mentioned the comms, you know, as it's coming up, is there a way of pulling together all the information sources and knowing how previous ones were, kind of putting it in a template and a format and pushing it out at regular intervals, but that might need some sort of tooling that could help bring it all together without replacing the humans, if that makes sense. So if there's a tooling for that, from an operational perspective, you're knowing, okay, this is the time you need this sort of data and you pull it all together and you help with producing a first view of what it might mean, but then it helps with the conversation, and when it's time for reporting and all that, you just push it out to the right people. So maybe there's a room to get some sort of tool set that kind of interfaces with, yeah, that's my thoughts. I wasn't prepared for this either, but we're just, you kind of sharing opinions. Denise Tilles I know, it's kind of an exciting blue sky moment, right? And I'm all for automating and replacing tasks that can be done just as well and then moving yourself into more strategic things that can't be done by AI or the tool. Ula Ojiaku Exactly, for now it's more of a good assistant, but I don't think humans are going to be replaced anytime soon, and there will still be that need to review the output. I was on a webinar on a Drucker Forum and Marshall Goldsmith is a well known Executive Coach, and he's developing an AI version of himself, kind of feeding it with all his works, the books, the articles, and all that, so that if you ask it a question, it's likely to respond the way he should. So this thing was asked, okay, who is Marshall Goldsmith married to, and it produced the name of someone else. I think she was like, his marriage would have been jeopardised. So you know, you feed it, but it's still hallucinates. So in addition to your Product Operations book, which I would highly, highly recommend to the listeners, please go get your version. The links to the book would be in our show notes. So what other books would you recommend to people? I know that there aren't that many Product Operations books, but what other books would you say have influenced your practice? Denise Tilles Yeah, definitely Escaping the Build Trap, this almost is a continuance of that because Melissa sort of alludes to Product Operations in there, but you know, here we're really going in deep on that. I listen to more podcasts than read. I probably should be reading more, but I love Teresa Torres's Continuous Discovery Habits, that's a great one. I did that as a book club with a client, but I just listen to a lot of podcasts. So Lenny's, Pivot I love, which is an American one that's more about tech and business in general. My husband is not in product or tech or any software or anything, and he loves it, so it's really appealing to a wide audience. I listen to a lot of comedy and as well and the New York times, and Melissa Perri's podcast as well. So those would be my recommendations. And Lenny has a great newsletter too, there's a free version and a paid, the folks that do the paid say they love it so I'm thinking of investing this year. Ula Ojiaku I like that word investing. And would you have any ask of the audience as we wind down? Denise Tilles Oh, I love that, just find out what Product Operations is, and does that make sense for your organisation? Is it something that you might be interested in as sort of a segue from your current role? You don't see a lot of people having years and years of Product Operations roles, so now is kind of a great time to think about. Do I want to get into this? And folks that I think really succeed in this type of position are typically Product Managers. They've done the job. They have that empathy, but I've seen really great sort of segues from customer support. There's that empathy aspect again, right, because in the end, Product Operations is about sort of being the PM for the PMs, but people that are Data Analysts, so that I think is important to think about, what does it mean to me? Do I understand it first? What does it mean to me? Would that have any impact on my company? And what would that look like? Where are we having challenges now and knowing what I've learned about Product Operations from this podcast or the book or whatever you've learned, could it make a difference? And we have notes in the book about how to make the case to your CEO or Manager and typical objections you might hear and how you might counter them. So we wanted to make it as tactical and realistic as possible, because there's a number of books out there in Product Management that are just sort of high level and theoretical and very idealistic, and I think people feel badly when they can't measure up to it or actually function that way. So we wanted to say, here are the challenges people have had, we're going to give it to you straight, here's where they've had wins, you can learn from that. So the idea was to have case studies with real companies and real artifacts that we've included in the book, people love seeing other companies, artifacts, so case studies, sort of a fictitious through line with a company that we made up, and sort of highlighting the typical challenges we see. And then the base, core content about Product Operations. So it's sort of three layers, and we've been really pleased with the feedback we've gotten that people are like, this was me, did you hear me thinking, how is this, but really wanting to make sure that we were truly being realistic about what you can expect and hopefully the benefits that you'll see too. So the challenges and the opportunities. Ula Ojiaku Sounds awesome, and there might be some listeners or viewers who will be thinking this sounds great, I'm excited, I've already ordered the book, I've read the book, and I think I'll need more help. So how can the audience get in touch with you if they wanted to? Denise Tilles Yeah, you can go to denisetilles.com and we'll have a link for that, you can shoot me a note and I'm happy to sort of hear what you're thinking about, challenges. I get emails a lot and sometimes we'll just have a couple of emails back and forth and that's it, or we'll talk about what it would look like to create more support for you. So I do coaching as well with Product Operations leaders, I'm kind of phasing that out, but occasionally I will take on clients, but it's more about Product Operations, how to stand that up, an assessment of whether it even makes sense to your company, assessment of, we'll look at, do you have people there right now that can actually do the work, but where do you have the opportunities and the challenges, and sometimes I'll speak to companies like, oh, it's all about data, and I'll get in there and talk to them like, well, you've got some challenges here, here and here too. Like, oh, great, and sometimes having just that objective viewpoint really helps sort of shine the light on challenges. Ula Ojiaku This has been fantastic, Denise. So, any final words for the audience? Denise Tilles Yeah, hopefully this discussion has peaked your curiosity, and if you're interested you can get a digital version of the book, or people love printed versions as well. If you're not sure you want to commit to that, do some Googling and see what is out there and how people are leveraging Product Operations today. One area, and comments I get a lot, and questions from people, is well, people are tightening their belts, reducing staff, there was probably a lot of over-hiring in software companies, especially during covid, and I have seen a couple of times where people are like, well Product Operations is a cost centre at the end of the day, and it is, you have to be proving your value all the time, that gets cut first, but it's kind of short sighted, because that's when you need Product Operations even more, if you're really hunkering down and making sure that every dollar or euro, or whatever your currency is, is being leveraged and maximised, that's where Product Operations can actually help. We've made these bets in terms of our product roadmap, let's check in, are we actually executing on them, or are we not? Do we need to pivot? If you're just delivering and delivering, you have no sense of that, so we may get back to the Build Trap or delivering things that aren't necessarily creating value for your customers. So I get excited when I hear stories about companies that have had layoffs unfortunately but they have kept their Product Operations teams and to me that's a smart way of thinking about maximising reduced resources. Ula Ojiaku Well thank you so much for that Denise. Again, it's been a pleasure having you as my guest on this podcast, I've learnt a lot, thank you Denise. Denise Tilles Thanks so much. Ula Ojiaku That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!   

Melissa Perri is the renowned author of "Escaping the Build Trap" and a well-known product consultant and educator. She has worked for a long time with Denise Tilles, another seasoned product leader, with whom she has been evangelising Product Operations to help scale product companies effectively. They recently collaborated on a book, coincidentally called "Product Operations", and we spoke all about the story behind the book and the themes within it. Saeed Khan and I are planning a new course - please give us your feedback! The relationship between product management and sales teams is traditionally tricky, and a common complaint from B2B PMs. Saeed Khan and I are looking to help with this with an online course and we'd love your feedback on your relationship with sales. This will help shape the course and, if you want to take part when the course is ready, we'll give you a special discount. Please fill in the survey here. Thanks! Episode highlights:   1. Product Operations is about helping product managers make faster, better-quality decisions It's important to dispel the myth of multi-armed product managers who can just do everything. There's too much for everyone to do! This creates barriers to doing great product management work and pulls product managers away from doing the real, value-add product management work that they're judged on. 2. There are three pillars of product operations... The three pillars are ways to think about how to organise enablement. They are "Business & Data Insights", "Customer & Market Insights" and "Process and Practices". They are all the foundation of good product decision-making, and all companies will have a certain level of maturity already. 3. ... But you don't need to build all the pillars all at once You don't need to fix everything at once. If you already have good capabilities in one or more areas, fix the ones that you don't have good capabilities in! You don't need to boil the ocean, just find the biggest gaps and opportunities to improve, and start to work on them. 4. Process shouldn't be seen as a dirty word There's such a thing as too much process but, even if you don't call it process or try to define it, all work involves a process. It's important to have people to oversee the process at scale, prevent duplication or rework, and make sure that process is right-sized rather than ever-expanding. 5. The first step is being honest about your current state There are plenty of ways to go with product operations as you scale, but the most important thing is being really honest with yourself about what your most important limiting factors are, what your product managers are spending time on and what's going to work for you. Check out "Product Operations" "Many companies want to reap the benefits of economies of scale that comes with being a product-led company. As our businesses change shape to focus more on software, so do our ways of working. We need to make sure we're breaking down these silos of information and capabilities that arise at scale. To react quickly and set great Product Strategies, leaders and team members alike need access to high-quality data and a process to implement their decisions." Check it out on Amazon or the book website. Check out "Escaping the Build Trap" "To stay competitive in today's market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer's needs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. " Check it out on Amazon. Contact Melissa & Denise You can catch up with Melissa at melissaperri.com, check out https://productinstitute.com or follow her on LinkedIn. You can catch up with Denise at denisetilles.com or follow her on LinkedIn. Escaping the Build Trap with Product Operations and Strong CPOs (Melissa Perri, Product Management Leader, Educator & Author "Escaping the Build Trap") OKRs: The Gateway Drug to Agility & Good Product Management (Jeff Gothelf, Product Management Consultant & Co-author "Lean UX" ) Achieving Product Excellence with the Product Operations Manifesto (Antonia Landi, Product Ops Consultant & Co-Author "Product Operations Manifesto") Adventures in Product Management (Dan Olsen, Author "The Lean Product Playbook") Going Global! When and How to Take your Product International (Chui Chui Tan, International Growth Adviser & Director @ Beyō Global) Your Product is a Joke - How to use Improv Comedy Principles in Product Management (Amogh Sarda, Co-founder @ Eesel) Leading & Evolving Product Teams Through Hyperscale (Brian Shen, Product Director @ ClickUp) Optimising Product Planning with the Quartz Open Framework (Steve Johnson, Product Coach)

Delve into the essence of the product function in startups, uncovering its pivotal role in boosting customer value and achieving sustained product-market fit. With the guidance of seasoned experts Andrea Saez and Dave Martin, we peel back the layers of strategic product marketing and development. Andrea brings over a decade of experience, having made significant strides in startups and scale-ups like Prodpad, Airfocus, and Trent with her strategic prowess and ability to foster cross-team collaboration. On the other side, Dave, with two decades of experience, shares his journey through innovative product developments and his instrumental role in scaling high-growth products, navigating through mergers, acquisitions, and supporting successful SaaS exits. This episode is more than just an interview; it's a masterclass where Andrea and Dave, authors of the bestselling book "The Product Momentum Gap," share the origin story of their collaboration, the pressing problems their book aims to solve, and invaluable insights into maintaining product-market fit. They elaborate on why product-market fit is not a one-time achievement but a continuous pursuit, emphasizing the importance of user behavior understanding and innovation. -------------------------------------- 00:00 In this episode 00:36 Intro 01:07 Today's guests 02:34 Origins of collaboration: from idea to book 05:04 The essence of product-market fit explained 07:14 What are the identifying signs of losing product-market fit? 12:00 Importance of visible data metrics for product teams 13:04 Value creation plan - aligning teams for growth 14:46 The crucial collaboration of Product & Marketing 19:02 Our Sponsor 19:42 Understanding the pillars: Technology vs. Product 22:39 Strategic pitfalls - Andrea's example 25:31 Navigating product management pitfalls - are you solving the right problems? 30:32 Empowering product teams: avoiding common mistakes and frustration 33:40 Are toxic dynamics harming psychological safety? Exploring leadership solutions 38:31 The Build Trap: prioritizing customer value over commercial deals 39:58 B2B product-market fit: the danger of tactical over strategy 43:49 Where to get a copy of The Product Momentum Gap? 44:47 Three Learned Things 49:17 Outro --------------------------------------

Joe has a book “Agile Kata” in the making, if you like to be the first to know when it launches, please visit www.agilekatabook.com.Transcript: Agile.FM Radio for the Agile Community. [00:00:05] Joe Krebs: Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Agile FM and I have here Melissa Perri with me. That is melissaperri. com. She's the author of the book, The Build Trap from 2018. And she just recently in October 23 released another book together with Denise. You have to help me with the last name. Phyllis.Phyllis, right? Product operations, how successful companies build better products at scale. And that was, I think I mentioned that October 23, so that's brand new. We want to talk today a little bit about our product and a topic I'm super interested in and that is Kata up, but before we do that, welcome to the podcast.[00:00:43] Melissa Perri: Thanks for having me[00:00:45] Joe Krebs: Melissa, you are known for your expertise in lean product strategy, user centric product development. You also a COO for Produx labs that is with an X at the end, so not products, it's produx. And I have all the links in the show page that is a product management consultancy, but I want to come back to that book you wrote in 2018, the build trap, because You say companies have a little bit of a dilemma when you wrote this book, because not only did they have to deliver faster, but faster, not only features, but value has anything changed since 2018?Since the book was released, did the dilemma get bigger, smaller, wider?[00:01:27] Melissa Perri: I think it got bigger, but we've seen a lot of progress. So I'm happy. I'm happy with the progress we made in the last five years. It's what happened was, I think. A lot of organizations now, we are not fighting the same battles I was fighting 10 years ago, where it's you must go talk to your users.Not everybody's still talking to your users, but they know they should be, right? Like I don't have to convince them that's a good thing to do. It's just that. Usually politics or systems or something else will get in the way of them actually going to do that. So what I'm observing though is a lot of companies are realizing they're in the build trap.There's a lot of people in the last five years who made strides to get out of the build trap. But there's still a lot of people who are stuck in it because they're just starting this journey. And the people who started this journey 10 years ago are making great progress. The people who started this journey like last year, they might be, a little more slow to be able to realize all the benefits. But the good thing is I don't think we're arguing about, do we actually need product managers What's the role of it? Should we be talking to our customers? How do we focus on value? Like people know that we should be doing those things. Now the question is, how do we do it?I [00:02:34] Joe Krebs: mean, there's still an emphasis based on my experience working with teams on just building features, and there could be like that pressure in an organization off, like releasing more features, but that's really not the goal here. What value do they carry?And so just want to make sure I get this right in terms of the. The build trap, right? [00:02:51] Melissa Perri: Yeah, exactly. The build trap is this place where organizations lose track of what value are we producing? And instead they're really focused on outputs instead of the outcomes. So what we're doing is we're measuring our success on things like how many features did we ship?Did we get everything done in time? Did it go out to our customers? And what happens is a lot of times we're not going back and revisiting. Those things that we released and saying, did they do something for business and for our customers? Did they actually solve a problem? Were they based on a problem?You see this happening with AI right now, right? There's always these places where we are like, Hey, there's a solution. Let's just implement a solution, but we're not pulling it back into what problem is this actually solving. And I had this conversation even with a CTO I was working with the other day where I was like, he has a whole AI strategy.I was like what is it, what are you going to do with that AI strategy, right? What problem is it solving? And we're doing a lot of work right now to uncover some customer problems. So I was like, let's pause this for a second, go and cover the problems and then go back and see if AI is a tool that can help us solve those problems in a unique, differentiated way.And that's how we have to look at. It's keeping the build trap, right? It's being able to really critically think about what we're building and why, and making sure that they go back to solving a need for our customers in a way that's going to scale our business. So it's not about ignoring business opportunities.So we should always be looking at those. But we have to remember that the way that we achieve business value is by. Solving customer problems in unique differentiated ways, [00:04:29] Joe Krebs: This is so this is really cool. I'm going to come back to that build trap here in a second, but I do want to go back to Summer of 2022 here for a second.When I was going to Nashville to the agile 22, which you deliver the keynote. I believe it was a Tuesday or Wednesday, but it was somewhere in the middle of the week. And I remember because I was hanging out in the open jam so that was the first I think after post COVID kind of agile conference, if I'm not mistaken.And it was quiet, it was very quiet on the open jam floor. A lot of people went to talks and everything, and that drastically changed when you deliver your keynote, because you mentioned the word Kata and I was out in a open jam and I constantly wanted to talk about agile Kata in terms of transformation, business agility, et cetera.But you related that to. Product and to your talk and after that keynote, obviously the floodgates were open, so to speak to open jam and people came in you were talking about Kata. How do people, and I think that's the question here to the build trap is how can people use the Kata in your opinion, the improvement Kata Michael Rother would popularize in his book, Toyota Kata to overcome that build trap.[00:05:36] Melissa Perri: I love Toyota kata it because. It makes you really take a step back and consider what you're doing. And it's not like this dogmatic framework that's really prescriptive for a specific moment in time. It can be applied to a lot of things. Like you said, like I actually learned kata. Teaching people Kanban Kata by Håkan Forss, right?And that's how I was introduced to it. And I had been a product manager for awhile and I was subcontracting for Kevin Bear actually, and Jay Bloom, and they introduced me to Kata and they said, can you help them think through their Kata using their Kanban using Kata? And I looked at it and I, once I started understanding more about Kata, I was like, this is how I approach product management.And I had been working with, a company called Lean Startup Machine where they taught a very specific approach to MVPs for companies where it was like, first you do a pitch, then you do a concierge experiment, then you may do a Wizard of Oz or something. And there was like a format to it. And it never the structure never sat right for me as a product manager, cause I'm not building a startup.I was inside of a company because I was like, in certain situations I wouldn't go in this order or I wouldn't do exactly that. And I'm like why doesn't the way that I operate fit into their. And it was having a hard time with it. And I was having a hard time explaining it, how I was thinking to other people.And when I introduced, when I got introduced to Kata, I was like, Oh my God, this is how I approach my thought process, but I've never had it Kata-fied before. And I do think it's a great, like problem solving framework that helps people solve problems and think about what they need to do and how they might get closer to a goal.So for me, what I found is that. When I was a product manager I taught it to other people who are around me. I taught it to my team so that we could build better products together and it caught on really well there. And then I started doing it as a consultant and as a teacher, I started teaching people kata to help them with product strategy and to help them with thinking through what they were going to build.And it kept expanding from there. And why I love teaching it is it's. It's really like a series of questions and it helps you get out of the build trap because it's asking you that critical question of why. And people get stuck in the build trap because they're not thinking about the why behind the features that they're building.And that's what Kata does. It slows you down for a minute to critically think about. Why are we investing in this? What is it going to do? And what do we expect at the end of the day? And I like even use it in informal settings all the time. Just like some of those key questions with leaders.So like I go in, I work with a lot of CEOs. I work with a lot of chief product officers and they'll show me their roadmap. They'll show me what they're building and I'll go, okay. What do you think, what is the goal that you're actually working towards, right? What's the outcome that you're trying to achieve?What do you know about the current state right now? What are the problems about our customers? And sometimes they don't have that answer. So I'm like, okay, let's go do some research, right? Let's now we know what action to take to learn that we can go explore what the problems are. We could go do use the research.We can get some data. Then we'll come back and then we'll set the next goal. And we get into strategy deployment there, right? Where we're setting a goal. We're trying to go out and do some experimentation around it, trying to learn a little bit more. And what it does is it really helps us learn about our businesses, our customers, our current situation.And critically thinking through all those things is what. Gets us to consider more options than just whatever solution idea came to your head first. And that's why I love Kata for product management for product strategy and deployment and creation and thinking through all these things, because it's not just about product management, but it's a broad framework that, anybody.Yeah. Anybody could understand, right? If I ask you, what's the outcome? What do you want to achieve from this? You're gonna, anybody can answer that depending on where you're sitting in this situation. And it's easy to understand, it's easy to grasp and it really helps people stop and start thinking more critically about stuff.So that's how I use it to help companies get out of the build trap. And even if I'm not going to introduce it in a super formalized way, like I've used it with, I have a Google sheet where I stepped through every part of the Kata when I'm experimenting with stuff and go all the way down. And I have some people I've taught love doing that, but even just the questions and the way that it makes us break down our logic and think about what's next, I think is really impactful for working with anybody in an organization just to get them to learn and deeply consider different things.[00:10:04] Joe Krebs: Right. I think something very interesting you said was like to slow down for a little bit, right? [00:10:08] Melissa Perri: Yeah. [00:10:09] Joe Krebs: and to think and really look at the the situation you are in product development and so many teams and an actual transformation aspect where I use the Kata a lot or business agility same thing, right?There's a tendency of all we know what the problem is, let's get started. Versus stepping back and say what, where are we right now? And I think that is a probably aspect in a product, but nobody wants to hear that. So it's let's slow down. Everybody's let's get started. [00:10:33] Melissa Perri: Yeah. [00:10:34] Joe Krebs: And it is getting started.[00:10:36] Melissa Perri: Exactly. It is getting started. That's like the best way to put it. One of the big things that I see people don't do is actually evaluate that current state. And that's a huge part of being able to set great product strategy and get out of the build trap. It's and when you go and look at your current state, and we do this with product ops, like in the book I was talking about, a lot of that is helping you get to that current state.It's about understanding like, what are your users doing now? What kind of customer segments do you serve? Who's using which products, what types of personas are using which products? And you can pull all this information out to get a current landscape of what is my company and my business and my product actually look like today.And if you don't understand that, it's really hard to figure out. Where you should go in the future, right? It's incredibly hard to set a vision. It's very hard to give direction to teams about where you're going. And the Kata introduces that super nicely in the way that it's laid out so that people don't skip over it.Cause a lot of times I'll see leaders go and just create a product vision out of thin air. And you're like based on what, right? But how does that relate back to what we're doing now? So it's been a great tool in helping people take that step back. Look at where we are before they actually want to leap forward and make assumptions about where we should go.[00:11:46] Joe Krebs: This is this is super cool. I do want to ask you something about something that's often connected with cut off thinking and also product development, especially if you're looking. It's a closer at scrum or the role of a product owner. There's a very rhythmic approach through sprints and iterations.Yes, you could do that with the Kata out. I researched product development companies out there and I think tanks. They don't necessarily work in these fixed iterations, right? So they're working more like ad hoc experimental approach. I just want to hear what your take is and how you would connect that maybe to the world of Scrum, the product owner role, and like just that rhythmic approach iterating over a product backlog.Versus more like the experimental approach and what do you see out there companies are doing? Probably also a little challenging because sometimes product development starts much earlier before there is a product backlog, right? Or something defined, iterate over. So there might be two steps to it.[00:12:44] Melissa Perri: Yeah, I have opinions about scrum. So here's where I think a lot of teams get stuck. There is a forcing function that's nice in scrum. Where. You say you need to break this down and make it small. And that's where the two weeks come from, right? So it's that you don't spend six months building a bunch of stuff and never showing it to the world and not getting the feedback.And I firmly agree with the concept of get things in front of customers early, get some feedback. Now that doesn't need to be get half baked ideas in front of 20, 000 customers early. It just means like sometimes we do these things behind the scenes. Like I'll work with B2B enterprises in healthcare and finance and all these completely regulated businesses.And what we'll do is we'll try to figure out how to test things with people early on. So we might. Build a small prototype, or we could build a even small subset of features into a product and let people use it in beta testing. So maybe it reaches 10 people, 20 people, we get feedback, and we iterate on that before we go and launch it to everybody else.To me, That's what scrum is trying to promote is that you get things out and have those feedback loops, but it took on a life of its own. I feel and people got really dogmatic about it, especially with the two week sprints. And I have worked in industries where. It does not take two weeks to actually get something built to be able to show to customers.So then what are you doing? You're just like giving people arbitrary deadlines and they're sprinting sprinting, but they don't have much to show for it. And again, pure scrum, people would say Oh, they're doing it wrong then. And I agree, but some work just takes longer. And to me, scrum is useful when there's.unknowns that you have to go test. But if you have to build something and you know it's going to take six weeks and you have concrete data that's the right thing to build go build it. Like, why are we trying to sprint for two weeks into six week cycles? That doesn't make any sense to me.So a lot of companies out there I think are using Scrum wrong, right? They're not thinking about what do we know, what do we not know about the things that we're building? These known, knowns and the unknowns of the world here. And you want to. In product development, get to a place where you're putting things out quickly and testing it with customers and getting some feedback.And like I said, you could do that in a small way when you're not sure if the solution you're building is the right thing for the customers and that's the thing that we're testing there. What I see with Kata is it allows for the flexibility of that when you started thinking through it. And when I've used it in practice, we, and I've used it with a lot of teams, I'll say to them, what's the first small step we can take to go learn if somebody actually likes this.And they might say, we we tried the prototypes. We think they're usably good. Now we have to build it in some small. Like that, that sometimes becomes the assumption we have to test in which case, maybe we get some beta testers. Like we said, we get 20 beta testers and we build it as code.We release it under a feature flag and we go test it in Kata. You would ask, how long is it going to take to build? That first thing, like when can we go see, right? When can we go see our results? It might be four weeks. It might be five weeks. It might be one week. It might be two weeks, right? There's no, you want to keep thinking about slimming it down as much as you can, but it's not prescriptive about this two week cycle.And that's why I like approaching things more like that rather than trying to time box it things into two weeks. I think time boxing is nice when you've got a Team that's not used to operating that way and it's a forcing function to get them to think smaller, right? So sometimes I'll ask them. Okay, cool.That's gonna take eight weeks. Could you do what could you do in two? What could you do in three? But then we'd have a conversation of yeah But if we did that in two we'd only be able to do this much and we wouldn't be able to get This part of it out and that part is really valuable and you're like, okay what about three right and you have that back and forth negotiation on it?But Scrum doesn't allow for that, right? Like it's nope, everything has to be in two week sprints. In certain forms of how people sprint. That's the part that doesn't sit well with me for Scrum, and where I think people are getting really caught up in the motions, but not thinking about why they're actually doing it.[00:16:57] Joe Krebs: Yeah. What's interesting, right? Because you also just said that about breaking things down into smaller pieces to make them fit, right? What I have seen in the past was like the teams overreact and these items become so, so small. [00:17:10] Melissa Perri: Oh yeah. And you don't want it to be too small, right? And that's a big thing too, where I've worked with a ton of teams who've missed Misunderstood what a minimum viable product is.And I don't even like to use that terminology now because it's just so butchered, but they'll be like, Oh, an MVP is just putting out these core functionality. And you go what are you going to learn when you release that? And that you don't already know now, because sometimes it's like, Oh, all we're going to learn is that it's not enough for people.They want more. And you're like, so why bother? Like why bother? If you know that's going to be the answer. Spend two more weeks and build something that's actually valuable there. And that's the conversations I think we need to be having when we think about breaking down product development and what's small and what's considered.And I do believe there's ways to slice things down into smaller chunks where you can get it out there, but it has to be valuable, right? It can't just be small. It has to be valuable. [00:18:01] Joe Krebs: Exactly. And I feel like that's a key point you're making here is where the Kata, it's almost like when you're talking about what's the next target condition, right?What is, and then you're talking about some valuable things, like there's a discrepancy between where we are right now and where we would like to be. And there's a value in between, right? And if you're aiming for that, and it could be two weeks, it could be one week, it could be two days or could be four weeks.So it's not so much about the time, but how fast can we go to that target condition? This is this is really awesome. So I love hearing your thoughts on these topics. And I hope that the listeners out there listening to this from a product management perspective or product owner role. Got some new ideas, the beauty of the Kata and the agile Kata I'm promoting a lot is that people can start anytime.[00:18:44] Melissa Perri: Yeah. I like that.[00:18:45] Joe Krebs: If you're listening to this and it's like, how do I. Do this, right? Everything's about experimentation. So why not experimenting with the the kind of approach and and try that and see how it works for you. And possibly make some modifications to it. And maybe the product management process itself could also be Kata-ized.So I think that would be awesome. Yeah, that's great. [00:19:04] Melissa Perri: I'd love to see more product managers doing it. I had actually talking to somebody in a couple of days who used it in the government with Congress people. Yeah. Doing product stuff. And I was like, that's cool. So lots of different contexts to do it.I hope it's a good tool that can help people be better product managers. [00:19:20] Joe Krebs: Yeah. And thanks for coming to the Kata series of Agile FM where I'm highlighting the multiple use cases of Kata thinking and how it could fit into the professional world out there. So thanks for taking the role on product management.Thank you, Melissa. [00:19:35] Melissa Perri: Thanks for having me

Becky Flint is the founder and CEO of Dragonboat, the world's 1st platform for outcome-focused product leaders and their teams. With over 20 years of experience in the PM industry, Becky has built and scaled products and technology teams at Fortune 500 and fast-growing startups - such as Feedzai, Bigcommerce, Shutterfly, and PayPal. Join host Andre Marquet as he uncovers Becky's inspiring journey through the tech industry, from breaking into PayPal to revolutionizing product portfolio management. This episode dives into key topics: **Navigating a career shift into tech at PayPal **Crafting effective product portfolio management in scale-ups **Strategies for overcoming organizational hurdles as a PM **Measuring success through an outcome-focused approach **Lessons learned, and challenges conquered as a CEO **Predictions and advice for aspiring product managers Highlighted books: **Escaping the Build Trap, Melissa Perri **Product Operations: How successful companies build better products at scale, Melissa Perri & Denise-Tilles **How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day, Michael Gelb. In this episode, we cover: (01:40) Shifting from medical studies to the Tech industry (07:29) Scaling PayPal's international expansion (12:10) Managing conflicting goals & metrics at PayPal (16:57) Product portfolio management and resource allocation (22:06) Product management strategies for limited resources (24:42) Product management skills and organizational challenges (29:23) Measuring success in outcome-focused organizations (35:42) Applying past career lessons in building Dragonboat (40:29) Challenges faced as a CEO at Dragonboat (46:12) Future predictions for the product management field (48:00) Becky's advice for entry-level product managers. Where to find Becky Flint: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beckyflint Dragonboat Website: https://dragonboat.io/ Where to find us: Website: https://productized.co/ Newsletter: http://bit.ly/3aMvWn2 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/school/produ… Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/productized.co/ Where to find Andre: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marquet/

Melissa Perri is the CEO of Produx Labs, a product management training organization; author of the seminal PM book The Build Trap; and a former Harvard Business School professor of product management. Denise Tilles is the CPO at Grocket, Melissa's colleague at Produx Labs, and a seasoned product leader with over a decade of experience. Together they authored the new book Product Operations: How successful companies build better products at scale. In today's episode, they share insights, strategies, and real-world experiences to master all things product ops. We discuss:• What exactly product operations is• The three pillars of the product ops role• The biggest benefits of adding product ops to your organization• Which tasks product managers should offload to product ops and which they need to own• How to help PMs embrace the value of product ops• Examples of companies that have implemented product ops well• Who and how to hire for this role—This entire episode is brought to you by Jira Product Discovery—Atlassian's new prioritization and roadmapping tool built for product teams—Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-product-operations-melissa-perri-and-denise-tilles/#transcript—Where to find Melissa Perri:• X: https://twitter.com/lissijean• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissajeanperri/• Website: https://produxlabs.com/—Where to find Denise Tilles:• X: https://twitter.com/dtilles• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denisetilles/• Website: https://www.denisetilles.com—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) About our guests, Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles(03:46) How common is the product operations role?(07:41) The benefits of having a product ops person in your organization(09:16) How to help PMs embrace the value of product ops(11:44) The three pillars of the product ops role(15:25) How user research fits in(18:35) Why product ops will be an essential role for product managers to thrive(24:24) Which tasks product managers should offload to product ops and which they need to own(28:58) Project management vs. product ops(29:44) The jobs of a product ops person(37:38) Why the product ops role will never become obsolete(39:31) How many product ops people you need(45:13) First steps in building out a product ops team(47:06) What to look for in your first hire(51:11) Key skills needed for a product ops person(57:29) Who product ops should report to(59:50) An example of rolling out product ops at Athena Health(1:09:35) Lightning round—Referenced:• Product Operations: How successful companies build better products at scale: https://www.productoperations.com/• Produx Labs: https://produxlabs.com• How to create a winning product strategy | Melissa Perri: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-create-a-winning-product-strategy-melissa-perri/• Blake Samic on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blakesamic/• Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value: https://www.amazon.com/Escaping-Build-Trap-Effective-Management/dp/149197379X• Athena Health: https://www.athenahealth.com/• Pendo: https://www.pendo.io/• PopSQL: https://popsql.com/• Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/understanding-the-role-of-product-ops-christine-itwaru-pendo/• Doodle: https://doodle.com/en/• Stephanie Leue on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanie-leue/• Jira: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira• Dovetail: https://dovetail.com/• Looker: https://cloud.google.com/looker/• Brian Bhuta on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianbhuta/• How to sell your ideas and rise within your company | Casey Winters, Eventbrite: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-sell-your-ideas-and-rise-within-your-company-casey-winters-eventbrite/• Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/thinking-beyond-frameworks-casey-winters-pinterest-eventbrite-airbnb-tinder-canva-reddit-grubhub/• Shared services model: https://www.gartner.com/en/finance/insights/shared-services-model• Shintaro Matsui on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/smatsui/• Tableau: https://www.tableau.com/• Jen Cardello on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jencardello/• Tim Davenport on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-davenport-28249b9/• Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral: https://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Genius-Rivalry-Delusion-Billion-Dollar/dp/0593299752• The Art of Action: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Action-10th-Anniversary/dp/1529376963• Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value: https://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Discovery-Habits-Discover-Products/dp/1736633309• Deutschland89 on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/series/deutschland-89-a4cf05f7-b4f2-44c7-84a1-4034671944b9• The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81414665• Love Is Blind on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80996601• The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80189221• Dragonboat: https://dragonboat.io/solution/product-operations/• Vistaly: https://www.vistaly.com/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Craft the ideal product strategy in this CTO podcast episode with Melissa Perri, author of “Escaping the Build Trap” and “Product Operations”.Find out how to become truly product-led: from your strategy to your metrics to your tooling. Listen to find out: - How to balance qualitative

This episode is a very special bonus one for Season 3. We chat to Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles about their highly anticipated and newly launched Product Ops book! Melissa is the CEO of Produx Labs, a Product Management training organisation, and the author of “Escaping the Build Trap.” Denise has over a decade of product leadership experience and works as an independent product consultant advising and coaching product teams across the world. In this episode, we find out more about: - their Product Ops book - the process of writing the book - the top three product challenges organisations face Listen in for some unique insights from the authors of Product Operations: How Successful Organisations ensure winning strategies and effectively scale. And if YOU would like to be a guest on Season 4 of POP, please get in touch and subscribe at productopspod.com

In this episode of the Productized podcast, our host Margarida Cosme speaks with Melissa Perri, author of the book Escaping the build trap. In this episode, Melissa deep dives into her extensive career and how the experience of being a software engineer and designer helped her become a better product leader. We also discuss escaping the build trap topic and what companies can do to become more outcome centric. Melissa talks about predictions over the last years and shares some trends she believes will become relevant in product management. I hope you enjoy this episode!

Melissa Perri, the author of the book "The Build Trap" joins Wes Bush to talk about the concept of the build trap, which is when organizations become stuck measuring their success by outputs rather than outcomes. They chat about the importance of focusing on products' value rather than just shipping features. Melissa also shares the signs that indicate a company is in the build trap, such as not knowing the expected outcomes of their products and lacking a product strategy. Melissa provides insights on escaping the build trap, including the need for a good organizational design, a strong product strategy, and effective product operations. She emphasizes the importance of a cultural shift and the need to practice new behaviors to build a product-led culture.  Key Takeaways:  [3:00]: Discussion on the concept of the build trap and its scariness and signs that indicate a company is in the build trap.  [10:00]: How to address the build trap and escape it.  [18:30]: Importance of a cultural shift and practicing new behaviors.  [22:00]: What a simplified version of a strategy for early-stage companies looks like. [30:00]: Introduction to the concept of Product Ops and its importance for product-led companies  [39:00]: Why transparency matters in product-led companies.  [42:00]: Benefits of developing good habits early on in a company's growth.  Links:  Melissa Perri's LinkedIn Melissa Perri's Twitter productinstitute.com  melissaperri.com  produxlabs.com 

As product lead, Russ Nealis has been focused on introducing the discipline of product management in the Developer Foundations organization. This episode discusses the reasons why PMs are currently uncommon in platform organizations, examples of when having a PM has been helpful, and more. Discussion points: (1:23) Russ's role at Plaid  (2:49) Why platform product managers are uncommon (3:28) Backgrounds to look for when hiring a platform PM (4:58) Deciding whether to hire a platform PM (6:20) Signs that bringing in a Product Manager would be beneficial (9:16) How Russ personally became a platform PM (12:15) Whether a platform PM is a career path  (14:55) Articulating the business impact a platform PM has (18:56) Challenges Plaid's platform team has faced without a PM   (19:19) Symptoms of a need for product management in an internal-facing team (30:15) Whether Twilio had platform PMs   (31:22) Example projects where PMs have been crucial (34:12) How the book “Ask Your Developer” influenced Twilio's engineering culture  (36:13) Getting started with introducing a product management discipline to an organization  (38:33) Org structure and where platform PMs may report  (40:00) Career ladder for platform PM when reporting to engineering leadership (41:20) Being product-led or technology-led (43:14) How technical skills may help when in a platform PM role ‍Mentions and links: Follow Russ on LinkedIn Episode 7 with Will Larson - related to why it's difficult to find Platform PMsEpisode 27 with Jean-Michel Lemieux - related to the percentage of investment that should be put towards platform investments The Build Trap by Melissa PerriAsk Your Developer by Jeff Lawson

In this episode of Unlearn Podcast, host Barry O'Reilly and two experienced tech executives, Melissa Perri and Gibson Biddle, meet for a Personal Board of Directors meeting. Melissa Perri is the founder and CEO of Produx Labs, a product management consultancy, and author of Escaping the Build Trap. She is also a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School. Gibson Biddle is a former Chief Product Officer at Netflix and renowned product leader and speaker. Using the CAMPS Model (community, autonomy, mastery, purpose, scale), they share personal insights on the importance of building relationships, continuous learning, work-life balance, and feedback. Throughout the episode, they provide practical tips and advice for personal and professional growth, including valuable lessons and takeaways for listeners seeking to succeed in their own careers and personal lives. Building a Community People who surround themselves with a strong network of friends, colleagues, and mentors tend to be more successful in their personal and professional lives. Your community can also provide emotional support and accountability, which are important for achieving goals and personal growth. Gibson shares that he has been engaged with the community of product leaders all over the world but feels like he hasn't done enough to mechanize it. He admits that his community score is his lowest. He acknowledges that Lenny Bruchitski is a great role model for building a community. Gibson likes to teach through talks and workshops; he is still very much a one-person company, which limits his leverage in creating a community. [Listen from 6:20] Retiring Gracefully Barry asks Gibson what flexibility would look like for him now that he is retiring. Gibson responds that he has optimized for flexibility by deciding what he chooses to do or not do every week. For him, autonomy and flexibility are almost the same. Talking to people who are presently or soon-to-be retired has also been helpful in providing insights, he tells Barry. His passion for speaking at events and workshops is what keeps him energized, and he plans to continue doing this even in retirement. “I get energy from my talks and workshops. It helps me age gracefully, stay current,” he remarks. “...You have to have a purpose,” Gibson stresses. “Even in retirement, you have to have goals. You have to be learning new stuff.” He explains how he learned to let go of his ego and focus on creating value instead of money. He rates himself on mastery, purpose and scale and shares his rationale for the scores. [Listen from 9:00] Find the complete show notes at BarryO'Reilly.com Resources: Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Website | Product Institute | Produx Labs Gibson Biddle on LinkedIn | Twitter | Website   Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

#19: Stephanie Leue, CPO at Doodle, joins Axel for a conversation centered about developing high-performing product teams. With more than 30 million MAUs, Doodle is the leading enterprise scheduling technology helping the world's largest brands instantly set meetings with clients, colleagues and teams.Stephanie has over 20 years of experience in software companies and has been engaged in product management for over 14 years. She formerly worked as Director of Product at Contentful, where she was in charge of growth, pricing and activation. As Paypal's product manager, she oversaw merchant onboarding and client activation as well as shaping Paypal Plus as product owner for the German market. Where to find StephanieLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanie-leue/Where to find AxelLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/axelsooriah/About PanashWe provide training and coaching programs to help product professionals unlock their true potential and become high performers.You can learn more about our programs here: https://www.panash.io/Our blog contains articles and free resources on key topics for product managers and leaders.Check it out here: https://collection.panash.io/Referenced in this episode75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional: https://hbr.org/2015/06/75-of-cross-functional-teams-are-dysfunctionalMartin Eriksson's Decision Stack: https://martineriksson.com/the-decision-stackInspired by Marty Cagan:Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri: Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres: Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni: Show notes and highlights(01:26) Stephanie's background(04:20) The 4P Framework for high performing teams(07:58) Pitfalls of implementing this framework(10:48) The power of repetition(15:14) Why companies fail at developing high performing teams(16:53) Stephanie's favourite topic(19:58) Setting expectation for high performing teams(23:28) Freedom through constraints(27:19) How do you help your team grow(29:26) Skill metrics for PMs(31:50) The role of a Principal Product Manager(34:56) Should Product Leaders spend most of their time coaching?(37:40) Stephanie's Treasure Chest───For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, please reach out to podcast@panash.io

In this episode, we speak with Melissa Perri, Founder & CEO of Produx Labs, joining us to discuss "The Case for Product Ops at the Executive Level." Melissa is a leading expert in the field of product management and product operations, and she will be sharing her insights on the vital role that product ops plays in driving business success at the highest levels of an organization. Get ready to learn from Melissa as she shares her experiences and knowledge on the importance of product ops at the executive level. Melissa Perri is a product management expert, board advisor, professor, and the author of “Escaping the Build Trap.” As a consultant, she worked with some of the largest companies in the world to transform their product organizations. Through her online schools Product Institute and CPO Accelerator she helped thousands of product managers and leaders level up their skills. In 2019, she was appointed to the faculty of Harvard Business School to teach Product Management in the MBA program. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/product-ops-people/message

In this episode, we speak with Melissa Perri, Founder & CEO of Produx Labs, joining us to discuss "The Case for Product Ops at the Executive Level." Melissa is a leading expert in the field of product management and product operations, and she will be sharing her insights on the vital role that product ops plays in driving business success at the highest levels of an organization. Get ready to learn from Melissa as she shares her experiences and knowledge on the importance of product ops at the executive level. Melissa Perri is a product management expert, board advisor, professor, and the author of “Escaping the Build Trap.” As a consultant, she worked with some of the largest companies in the world to transform their product organizations. Through her online schools Product Institute and CPO Accelerator she helped thousands of product managers and leaders level up their skills. In 2019, she was appointed to the faculty of Harvard Business School to teach Product Management in the MBA program. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/product-ops-people/message

#11: AnyBill's Chief Product Officer, Alex Lüke, joins Axel to talk about how the Berlin-based startup is transforming the digital receipts landscape with their B2B solution. Axel and Alex talk about what it means to build a SaaS product at an early stage and the implications on how product drives value.Alex shares her perspective around building knowledge across merchants and customers, using insights for decision-making and prioritising at the intersection of business challenges and customer experience.Where to find AlexLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandra-l-41b527138/Where to find AxelLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/axelsooriah/About PanashWe provide training and coaching programs to help product professionals unlock their true potential and become high performers.You can learn more about our programs here: https://www.panash.io/Our blog contains articles and free resources on key topics for product managers and leaders.Check it out here: https://collection.panash.io/Show notes and highlights(01:34) Alex's background(04:11) AnyBill's origin story(06:41) How does the team at AnyBill identify opportunities(09:31) How to inform decision-making with insights across merchants and end-customers(16:48) Receipt digitization opens up many other opportunities(20:28) How AnyBill prioritises their initiatives being an early-stage B2B business(25:04) What's next for AnyBill(28:02) Why spend time on Q&A and testing at an early stage(30:33) Alex's Treasure Chest───For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, please reach out to podcast@panash.io

In this episode, Peter Birch, Host of the Talking HealthTech Podcast, lets us in on the latest scoop about tech in healthcare and how much this industry has grown over the years. He also talks about some of the new technologies that clinic owners can look forward to and how we can contribute to the development of better healthcare tech in our own ways.If you want to know more about how you can incorporate different kinds of technologies into your clinic systems and treatment plans – or if you need help with just about anything! – reach out to us via our website or email Jack at jack@clinicmastery.com. We'll be happy to help!SHOW NOTES[04:10]  Stories of tech growth in health tech[07:27]  Cool healthcare startups you need to check out[10:36]  How tech can play a role in healthcare[14:20]  Why clinic owners should join user communities and participate in beta testing[21:04]  Lessons that startup founders learned after creating a startup[26:42]  What kind of technologies can we look forward to in the near future?[30:54]  Know more about healthcare tech on The Talking HealthTech PodcastMENTIONSNew Trends in Healthcare Tech and Why They're Worthy Investments (Ep. 160)Transforming Healthcare With Immersive Virtual Reality Tech (Ep. 254)Talking HealthTech PodcastEscaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri (book)CONNECTLinkedInIf you found this episode valuable, don't forget to give us a thumbs up, share, comment, and give us your ratings on iTunes and Stitcher. We appreciate your support and feedback!

Today we have two Women In Product community members ready to discuss Melissa Perri's book, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value. Sparkle Joy Meadows and Marie Chaisson join and share how this book resonates in the Product work they do daily. Share your favorite PM book with us: https://productblenders.typeform.com/bookideas

Taking this episode to stop and reflect on the current state of product owners, agility, and lots of other basic information. If you are just starting out, this is a great first episode. If not, it's a good idea to review the basics and make sure you aren't skipping anything. Also looking back on the last 50(ish) episodes and what main ideas came from each one. Feedback: Twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com Support: Product Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Support - Buy me a Coffee Links: The Scrum Guide SeekTaiju Links for Product Owners The Beautiful Mess - The Basics Many More Much Smaller Steps Product Coffee - Escaping the Build Trap

I've been shipping more than I've been getting customer feedback with integrations directory lately. Jamming about that, some corrections and the build trap by Melissa Peri

O que a autora Melissa Perri chama em seu livro de Build Trap é um problema que acontece quando as empresas começam a medir seu sucesso pelas entregas e não pelos resultados. O tema é tão relevante, e essa é uma cilada que pega tantas empresas de software que a Melissa escreveu um livro dedicado para ajudar empresas a evitarem esse problema. Quando você começa a medir mais “o quanto” está entregando do que “o valor” que essas entregas estão de fato trazendo para seus clientes fique atento. Tudo aquilo que você adiciona de funcionalidades em seu produto deveria estar diretamente ligado à algum tipo de valor de negócio, o valor não pode ser a quantidade de funcionalidade entregues, mas os problemas que foram resolvidos e o valor que foi criado. Normalmente, as startups quando estão na fase de encontrar o Product-Market-Fit, entendem que tudo são hipóteses a serem validadas e, naturalmente, já questionam todas as premissas até encontrar o caminho de maior valor. Já depois de ter um produto mais maduro e com usuários ativos isso, muitas vezes, acaba se perdendo. Para evitar a armadilha uma das boas práticas é sempre começar perguntando o porquê. Mas atenção a resposta deve ser um problema e não a falta de uma funcionalidade. O um dos erros mais comuns apontados por Melissa é definir o problema como sendo a falta de uma funcionalidade em vez de o que aquela falta causa. Problema: Clientes não tem dashboard personalizados Solução: Permitir criar dashboards personalizados. Note que o problema real, não é o fato de não ter dashboards personalizados no produto, mas sim algo que o cliente não está conseguindo fazer para atingir seus objetivos. Esse é um sinal para mergulhar mais profundamente e realmente entender o problema do cliente. Aquela máxima que entender o problema de verdade já é grande parte da solução realmente se aplica nesse caso. Muitas vezes o próprio usuário/cliente pode te influenciar pulando direto para o a funcionalidade que ele acreditar resolver melhor seu problema. Dê um passo atrás e mergulhe no problema. Essa será a melhor forma de certificar que o foco esteja em buscar a melhor solução. Recomendo bastante a leitura do livro da Melissa (infelizmente parece ainda não estar disponível em português). E para mim o que ficou é lições aprendidas: O problema não é a falta de funcionalidade. O foco deve estar em problemas resolvidos e não funcionalidades entregues. Após entregar é preciso acompanhar e medir para certificar que o objetivo foi atingido.

Clarity of Purpose with the North Star Framework For many teams, trying to figure out why you're building what you're building is a good question to ask. I have found out in my career that most teams don't really understand why they're building what they are building. It's interesting to look at the models for creating great software, like The British Design Council and the Double Diamond. On the left is discovery, and on the right is delivery. So discovery and delivery. We always talk about delivery. We obsess over it. We very rarely do product well, or discovery well. And a good product is really about discovery. One person who has nailed it is Melissa Perry. In her book, 'Escaping the Build Trap', she talks about people blindly building. And building backlogs It's comfortable for teams because they are in their groove. And they knock out another widget, ticket or feature without thinking about the impact and who it's actually for. Get the JIRA tickets closed, get the storage complete, get the sprint done, and move on! There are a lot of frameworks to talk about. But generally people don't know. The move from project to product was supposed to fix this. But I don't think it has. Because product managers have people building things like 'billyo'. But often they are building the wrong thing. A great saying is: "Build the thing right, build the right thing, build it quickly". We're good at building quickly and good at building the thing right. But we're not very good at building the right thing. And that's what breaks companies. Because building the wrong things can be expensive. For a number of years, the work we've been doing is streamlining development processes and building high performance teams. But we can fall into that trap as well. Here's all the patterns and automation that you can leverage. Just go hit that button. But you need to make sure you always take a step back and ask, what's it for? And who is it for? If you don't understand the impact you're trying to have, how can you do the right thing? Or build the right thing? How can you know what success looks like? What conversations are you having on potential approaches and ways to achieve that success? It all ties back to data, metrics and understanding the problem you're trying to solve. If you're not doing that, it dilutes the good intent of good teams and engineers. How can they build the right thing if they don't understand what success is? Or the problem they're trying to solve? And what are our options? It's a challenging thing to do. The frameworks on mindset and helping you think in the right way, lead you to what you need to solve. In 'The Value Flywheel Effect' book, the first phase of the value flywheel is 'Clarity of Purpose'. We base that on a leader persona, like the CEO. In other words the person who needs to drive the purpose. One thing we find helpful, which is not well understood, is the North Star Framework from Amplitude. We discovered it a few years ago. And it collectively blew our minds. We have used it ever since. It's a neat framework. One thing to note are the leading and lagging metrics. The four disciplines of execution was the first version of understanding lead and lag metrics. And how you can build the work into a Northstar metric and then a long term goal. It's a simple framework that people can get in an hour long session. Your teams can share and collaborate. And online collaboration tools have helped make this a lot easier. You don't need to be physically present. You do it online, which is great. We tailor it a little bit with pre Wardley mapping tools on 'what's your scope and what's your purpose?'. Your users and their needs sets the context leading into the Northstar. It gets everybody back on the same page if they have forgotten about a user. Or if they have forgotten that they do something for a set of people and their needs. One big thing we've noticed with this and Wardley Mapping is that it invites challenges. You are not challenging the person or the team, you're starting to have a conversation about North Star metrics, KPIs and the work aligned to that. You're not challenging a person. It provides a safe space for the right challenge to happen. I like the lag and lead measures concept. Development teams keep themselves busy sometimes, chasing vanity metrics. And gamification of vanity metrics is fun. But in actual fact, what you need are lead measures. What are the things that impact business success? They are the lagging measure. I love the traceability of the Northstar. You can go from business metrics back to your work. Or you can go from your work to the business metrics. I think that's the real power behind it. Melissa Perry: 'Escaping the Build Trap' Marty Cagan: 'INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love' Amplitude: The North Star Framework Jon Cutler Simon Sinek: 'Start with Why' & 'Golden Circle'.   Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge theserverlessedge.com @ServerlessEdge

Benoît est VP of Design chez Botify. Benoît n'est pas designer de formation, car il a commencé par des études littéraires. A la sortie de ses études, il rejoint l'agence web Business Lab en tant que concepteur rédacteur. Dans cette agence, il côtoie des designers et commence à utiliser Photoshop. Après 2 ans de pratique sur son temps libre, Benoît est recruter en tant que Designer et apprend son métier sur le tas. Après quelques temps, Benoît décide de passer freelance avant d'être contacté par l'agence World Appeal pour constituer son équipe Design. Il travaille sur des newsletters et des sites internet pour des entreprises du luxe ou des banques. En même temps, Benoît fonde *designers interactifs*, une association professionnelle autour du Design. Son objectif principal : faire en sorte que les designers se rencontrent et partagent leur métier et leurs méthodes de travail, ce qui n'était pas quelque chose d'évident en 2006. Après plus de 200 évènements organisés, l'association se concentre désormais sur l'évolution du marché du Design au travers d'études annuelles. Via cette association, Benoît a également rejoint le Conseil National du Design en septembre 2021, qui conseille le gouvernement français sur politique de Design. Il nous explique comment fonctionne le conseil, ce qui en est attendu et à que cela va servir. Après 3 ans à travailler intensément pour l'agence World Appeal, à la rédaction d'un livre, au développement de *designers interactifs* et à l'enseignement, Benoît décide de quitter World Appeal, pour faire du freelance et à construire le cours de design d'interaction de l'école Strate. Benoît revient sur le cours qu'il a mis en place à l'époque en étant convaincu que les interactions allaient passer par des objets physiques plus que par des interfaces numériques. En parallèle, Benoît est freelance, il se retrouve une nouvelle fois à faire le grand écart entre toutes ses activités et décide de se reconcentrer. Au même moment, il est contacter pour retourner chez World Appeal pour y occuper le rôle de Head of UX. Il revient sur les raisons qui l'ont poussé à revenir dans sa précédente agence. On discute également des méthodes de travail en agence : recherche utilisateur, suivi des livrables, etc. Après 4 ans, Benoît qui une nouvelle fois l'agence. Cette fois, il a l'envie de travailler directement pour et dans une entreprise. Ce qui l'amène chez Oodrive en tant qu'Head of Design. Il nous explique les raisons de son recrutement, comment il a développé une vision design dans une entreprise vieille de 18 ans, pourquoi et comment faire de la user research, quels profils recrutés et comment les faire monter en compétences, comment refondre et designer 7 produits différents et comment la micro-copie. Au bout de 4 années, Benoît à envie de voir autre chose. Il souhaite rejoindre une entreprise avec plus de moyens et un esprit plus start-up de que PME. C'est alors qu'il rejoint Botify en tant que VP of Design. Un rôle similaire à son précédent, mais avec une dimension beaucoup plus stratégique. Pour le podcast, Benoît revient sur ce qu'il a mis en place durant ses 6 premiers et les défis qui arrivent dans les prochains mois et les prochaines années. Les ressources de l'épisodes *designers interactifs* Oodrive Botify Le Medium de Benoît Le Design des choses à l'heure du numérique, Jean Louis Fréchin Continuous Discovery Habits, Teresa Torres Escaping the Build Trap, Melissa Perri Les autres épisodes de Design Journeys L'épisode #9 avec Mickaël David, Design Director @ Doctolib L'épisode #15 avec Audrey Hacq, Product Design Director @ OpenClassrooms L'épisode #25 avec Morgane Peng, Experience Design Director @ SGCIB L'épisode #32 avec Léa Mendes da Silva, VP Design @ Payfit L'épisode #40 avec Jordan Warmoes-Nielsen, Co-fondateur @ The Design Crew Case Study #2 - Discovery Discipline avec Rémi Guyot & Tristan Charvillat Pour contacter Benoît LinkedIn Pour soutenir le podcast, n'hésite pas à mettre ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ sur Apple Podcast ou Spotify pour aider les autres designers à découvrir le podcast 

Derek O'Carroll is the CEO of Brightpearl, a retail operations platform for retailers and wholesalers. Derek worked with many startups and has made many exits in his career. He got involved with Brightpearl when it wasn't profitable and is here to talk to us about how he facilitated Brightpearl's turnaround. Derek details the process he went through to evaluate what was working and what wasn't, to get rid of unprofitable customers, and the key project that he started when he first joined the company. Tune in to learn the impacts of changing pricing and customer focal point on Brightpearl's churn and dollar retained revenue, as well as the strategies Brightpearl uses to get new customers. During this interview, we discuss: 1:08 – A bit about Derek's background 3:00 – Introducing the turnaround of Brightpearl 3:30 – What is Brightpearl and why did Derek choose to work for Brightpearl? 5:09 – How Derek identified companies in markets that could be disrupted 6:33 – The size and scope of Brightpearl: Now & Then 9:14 – How to win $100 just for listening to this podcast! 10:16 – The strategies they're using to get new clients 13:01 – How Derek evaluated what was working and what wasn't working at Brightpearl 15:20 – Adjusting pricing + Getting rid of unprofitable customers 17:30 – Changing the culture to drive profitability 18:27 – The key project that Derek started when he joined Brightpearl 19:50 – Big takeaways from that project 22:18 – Impacts of changing pricing and customer focal point on churn and dollar retained revenue 24:08 – What they changed within their engineering team to control the growth of legacy 26:27 – What is Derek's dream business superpower? 28:22 – Derek shares his favorite growth driver. 28:58 – His most recommended books 29:30 – How to get in touch with Derek Plus, a whole lot more! Derek's Websites: Follow Derek on Twitter Brightpearl Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri Rubicon by Tom Holland -------------- If you enjoyed this episode, please RATE / REVIEW and SUBSCRIBE to ensure you never miss an episode. Connect with Dennis Brown  AskDennisBrown.com LinkedIn Twitter Instagram [Free Giveaways]

Community Impact Newspaper reporter Wesley Gardner discusses rising pet abandonment rates at area animal shelters. A local hospital system fails to come to a deal with a major insurance company.   The CI Morning Breakdown is a production of Community Impact Newspaper. It is produced by Olivia Aldridge with editing by Marie Leonard. Weather and allergy reports are sourced from www.weather.com and AccuWeather.

An interview with Melissa Perri. Melissa is a product leader, educator, board member, consultant, coach and also the author of one of the best books on product management, "Escaping the Build Trap". These days she's an evangelist for the role of product operations and setting up CPOs for success in the executive suite. We talk about a lot, including: Revisiting Escaping the Build Trap, what the build trap is, why people find themselves there and why they struggle to get out How her thinking has evolved since the book, and why she believes that product operations is a critical lever for scaling organisations What product operations is, how it enables you to scale, and the three pillars of product ops transformation that companies tend to go through Whether it's fair to label product operations as the revenge of process people or whether that's a total misrepresentation Why we should always be looking to optimise how we're working, not just sticking to what has worked in the past because it worked in the past The need for strong CPOs so that product teams have a seat at the top table, why this is essential for product led companies and at what stage you need them What the CPO role actually involves, what product people need to do to get good at it, and the tendency for product people to lack the confidence for the top table And much more! Buy Escaping the Build Trap "To stay competitive in today's market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer's needs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. " Check it out on Amazon, or on Goodreads. You can also check out book website. Melissa's new book "Product Operations" Melissa is writing a new book on product operations with her friend & colleague Denise Tilles. Check out the progress on ProductOperations.com. Contact Melissa You can reach out to Melissa on Twitter or check out MelissaPerri.com.

We discuss everything around internationalization of a product and an organization as well as the job of a product owner (and the lack of one on Monica's team). Quark (https://cheese.com/quark/) Escaping the Build Trap (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42611483-escaping-the-build-trap) by Melissa Perri You can reach us via email at hosts@expandingbeyond.it (mailto:hosts@expandingbeyond.it). You can follow us on Twitter at @podcast_eb (https://twitter.com/podcast_eb). Where to find Monica on the internet: Website: monicag.me (https://monicag.me/) Twitter: @KFMolli (https://twitter.com/KFMolli) Github: @nirnaeth (https://github.com/nirnaeth) Blog: dev.to/nirnaeth (https://dev.to/nirnaeth) Where to find Urban on the internet: Twitter: @ujh (https://twitter.com/ujh) Github: @ujh (https://github.com/ujh/) Blog: urbanhafner.com (https://urbanhafner.com/) The intro and outro music is Our Big Adventure (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Holmes/Happy_Music/Our_Big_Adventure) by Scott Holmes (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Holmes). It's licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

Storytelling is a very underrated skill in product management. In this episode from our Business Storyteller Summit 2020, we speak with Melissa Perri, CEO of Produx Labs, a Product Management consultancy, about how product leaders can use storytelling to get buy-in from their product teams and customers. Melissa believes the key to creating great products is growing great product leaders. Committed to that mission, she created the online school Product Institute, where she has shared her scientific approach to Product Management with over 3,500 students. In 2019, she was appointed to the faculty of Harvard Business School to teach Product Management in the MBA program. As a consultant, Melissa works with executives worldwide to set up their product organizations, advise on product strategy, and grow product leaders into Chief Product Officers. On top of that, Melissa Perri is also the author of “Escaping the Build Trap”. Find out more about Melissa on her website. Stay connected with Melissa on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Author of Escaping the Build Trap Show notes: https://www.markgraban.com/mistake96 My guest for Episode #96 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Melissa Perri. She is the author of the book Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value. Melissa does many things, including hosting the podcast Product Thinking with Melissa Perri. She is Founder & CEO of Produx Labs. Melissa created the online school Product Institute, where she has shared her scientific approach to Product Management with over 3500 students. She also started a program called the CPO Accelerator. In 2019, Melissa was appointed to the faculty of Harvard Business School to teach Product Management in the MBA program. Melissa is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, having addressed audiences in over 35 countries. She has a B.S. in Operations Research and Information Engineering from Cornell University. In today's episode, Melissa shares her “favorite mistake” story related to working for a software company, where they produced a big requirements document and then built software that, basically, nobody wanted to use. People SAY they'll use it, but really?? Other topics and questions: How do we know if it's a great startup idea? The Highest Paid Person's Opinion? Risk of creating smaller batches but not being open to experiments not working out *MVP – minimum viable product Delegating the things you're really good at Didn't listen to gut over advice, warring with herself for years “Experiment theatre” What is “The Build Trap”? As a consultant, have to be careful not naming names when presenting on stage or doing podcasts… everyone's on a journey Product management mistakes? Is the problem the product managers or the company? Find Melissa onTwitter LinkedIn --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/favorite-mistake/support

This month we discussed the book "Escaping the Build Trap" together with the author Melissa Perri and other Product Managers. We all shared our main take aways from the book, experiences on the build trap and discussed with Melissa about product-led organizations, why is it so difficult to really measure value, tips on sharing value when you are a team working on a legacy product among many other topics. ------------ About the Product Book Club: Discuss product-related books once a month with new product colleagues and the book's author. Join productbookclub.com to know what other books we are reading, and participate in the upcoming discussions! Follow us on Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/company/productbookclub/ https://www.facebook.com/productbookclub https://instagram.com/productbookclub https://twitter.com/prodbookclub

Melissa Perri is on a mission to grow great product leaders. This conversation will help you to become more strategic and multiply your impact. -----Please consider taking ~40 seconds to rate/review the show on Apple Podcasts. It really helps. (Rate/review links at the very bottom of the page.)Click here to directly email Andrew your questions, comments, and feedback! He reads everything that is sent in (click 'Allow' if you get a popup): connect@makethingsthatmatter.comLinks & resources mentionedMelissa Perri: Twitter, websiteMelissa's new podcast, Product ThinkingMelissa's book: Escaping the Build TrapRelated episodesMarty Cagan: Empowering product teams to do the best work of their lives (#31)Hope Gurion: What nobody told you about being a product leader (#27)BooksMelissa's book: Escaping the Build TrapThe Art of ActionOther resources mentioned"The Product of You": A Talk from Melissa Perri on Product LeadershipHow to know if you're interviewing at a product-led companyWhat is Good Product Strategy? — Melissa PerriCost of delayGib Biddle strategy framework

Derek O'Carroll is CEO of Brightpearl and in this episode we're talking about their incredible SaaS turnaround story from near failure to +$15M ARR & +40% year-on-year growth. When Derek took over as CEO of Brightpearl, he described the company as a "distressed asset". It was burning cash, had very high churn, and a culture where talented people were rowing in different directions. Fast forward to today and Brightpearl is growing rapidly and Derek has masterminded a successful SaaS turnaround story. In this episode, Derek discusses: - Brightpearl's three-pronged turnaround strategy - How they realigned product-market fit - How they grew ACV - Building a talented team where the right people are in the right place - The impact the strategy has had - How Brightpearl reduced churn from 28% to below 8% Links Brightpearl >> https://www.brightpearl.com/ Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri >> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42611483-escaping-the-build-trap --- Advance B2B >> www.advanceb2b.com Follow The Growth Hub on Twitter >> twitter.com/SaaSGrowthHub Follow Edward on Twitter >> twitter.com/NordicEdward

"Last year, before COVID, something happened during one of the all-hands weeks. And it was incredibly awkward." What happens when a co-worker takes an unexpected trip to your hometown... halfway across the country? We talk with product leader, author of "The Build Trap," and founder of Produx Labs, Melissa Perri about this perplexing situation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the first book in their #BookBoyz series, Licheng and Kenji discuss a great book on building product: "Escaping the Build Trap" by Melissa Perri. They also dive into a listener question about working with stakeholders who don't value user research. In this episode, they discuss:What is the build trap?What are the 4 types of organizations that Perri discusses?What does a product-led organization look like?Key takeaways from the bookResources mentioned:Escaping the Build TrapAbout the PodWe're Jabbin' is a weekly podcast hosted by Kenji Kaneko (a Product Designer) and Licheng Zhu (a UX researcher) where they discuss and debate topics broadly related to UX research and design.Follow us!Follow the podcast on Twitter: https://twitter.com/WereJabbinFollow Kenji: https://twitter.com/kenjivkanekoFollow Licheng: https://twitter.com/LichengerEmail the pod with questions, topics you'd be interested, or feedback:werejabbin@gmail.com

Este es el último episodio de SaaS Product Chat de este 2020 tan extraño para todo el mundo por la pandemia del Covid-19. Cerramos con un episodio especial en donde hablamos de nuestros favoritos del año en distintas categorías: podcasts, lecturas, newsletters, cuentas de twitter, productos digitales y canales de youtube.Recordad que regresamos en enero de 2021. Gracias por acompañarnos durante estos 112 episodios de las tres temporadas de SaaS Product Chat. Se vienen muchas buenas entrevistas técnicas y chats sobre tópicos de software para 2021. Por lo pronto, desearos felices fiestas y nos vemos a inicios de año.Lo mejor del 2020 en todas las categorías:1) Episodios más escuchados del año en audio:E77: Métricas que sí importan en una empresa SaaS: https://saasproductchat.com/episodes/metricas-2 E76: Cómo alinear equipos de producto, ingeniería y diseño: https://saasproductchat.com/episodes/equiposEpisodios más vistos del año en nuestra playlist de YouTube en el canal de Software Gurú:E100: Entrevista a Jorge Villalobos (latincoder) de Microsoft: https://youtu.be/Fv5wSUsQTZsE60: Trabajar en Google como Ingeniero de Software con Fernando Seror https://youtu.be/UE4AImDjCto?list=PLnLzwYW6HOC6SJ4d66pMm8ZWjEmgIwwRpE87: Entrevista a Julián Duque de Heroku https://youtu.be/pmNtWrhXaH8?list=PLnLzwYW6HOC6SJ4d66pMm8ZWjEmgIwwRpListas de reproducción recomendadas del Canal de Software Gurú:Hackathon BBVA 2020 - grabación talleres https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnLzwYW6HOC5pme0k20WwZo7arnr9UOY1SG Virtual 20.04: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnLzwYW6HOC5b0FBwTYtW4yOH23ibwOSY2) Podcasts:Los podcasts favoritos de Danny Prol: https://dprol.github.io/blog/hydejack/2020-07-18-podcasts/Software Engineering Daily: https://softwareengineeringdaily.comEpisodio con Sujith Jay de Nubank: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2020/02/06/nubank-data-engineering-with-sujith-nair/Afterwork en español: https://open.spotify.com/show/1CJkfOKY2BYpiGKRi2z2wjBucle Infinito: https://www.breaker.audio/bucle-infinitoRevista 5W: https://www.revista5w.com/podcastSwitched On Pop: https://switchedonpop.com/episodes/happy-birthday-is-the-worst-with-anne-marieApple Coding: https://cuonda.com/apple-codingLa Azotea: la.azotea.coVillage Global: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/village-globals-venture-stories/id1316769266ChurnFM: https://www.churn.fmThis is Product Management: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-is-product-management/id9752844033) Lecturas:Migrante de Marcos Antil: https://www.amazon.com/MIGRANTE-guatemalteco-emprendedor-tecnol%C3%B3gico-testimonio/dp/1096708566Una educación de Tara Westover: https://www.amazon.es/Una-educación-NARRATIVA-Tara-Westover/dp/8426405169La escuela del mundo: https://www.amazon.es/escuela-del-mundo-revolución-educativa/dp/8434431351/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1608738475&sr=1-1The Product-Led Organization: https://www.pendo.io/the-product-led-organization/Start At The End: https://mattwallaert.com/startattheend/The Build Trap: https://melissaperri.com/bookThe Almanack: https://www.navalmanack.comArmas de titanes: https://www.amazon.es/Armas-titanes-costumbres-alcanzado-colección/dp/842342894X/ref=sr_1_2?__mk_es_ES=ÅMÅŽÕÑ&crid=11WSLBU32BEN8&dchild=1&keywords=tools+of+titans&qid=1608808586&sprefix=tools+of+tita%2Caps%2C193&sr=8-2The Messy Middle: https://www.amazon.es/Messy-Middle-Finding-Through-Hardest/dp/0525540385/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_es_ES=ÅMÅŽÕÑ&dchild=1&keywords=messy+middle&qid=1608808672&sr=8-1Atomic Habits: https://www.amazon.es/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break/dp/0735211299/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_es_ES=ÅMÅŽÕÑ&crid=1QTGUHOIKUI06&dchild=1&keywords=atomic+habits&qid=1608808876&sprefix=atomic+habits%2Caps%2C-1&sr=8-1Product Roadmaps: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/product-roadmaps-relaunched/9781491971710/People Powered: https://www.jonobacon.com/books/peoplepowered/The Infinite Machine: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-infinite-machine-camila-russo?variant=321233338368344) Newsletters:Hacker Newsletter: https://hackernewsletter.com/El Newsletter DEV: https://elnewsletter.dev/Bankless: https://banklesshq.comLatamList: https://latamlist.com/5) Cuentas de twitter:Kote: https://twitter.com/kotecinhoJosé Luis Antúnez: https://twitter.com/jlantunezFreddy Vega: https://twitter.com/freddierYeison Daza: https://twitter.com/yeion7Pedro Galvan: https://twitter.com/pedrogkwenbin: https://twitter.com/wenbinfVictoriano Izquierdo: https://twitter.com/victorianoiGreg Isenberg: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergCommunity Club: https://twitter.com/CommunityClubHQIndie Worldwide: https://twitter.com/indie_worldwideInterintellect: https://twitter.com/interintellect_Anna Gát: https://twitter.com/TheAnnaGatThe Open Enchilada: https://twitter.com/openenchilada6) Productos digitales:1password: https://1password.com/es/Songlink/Odesli: https://odesli.co/FeaturePeek: https://featurepeek.com/Trifacta: https://www.trifacta.com/Command E: https://getcommande.com/RudderStack: https://rudderstack.com/Pioneer: https://pioneer.app/Analog: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ugmonk/analog-the-simplest-productivity-system?lang=esNeeva: https://neeva.co/hndex: https://hndex.org/Flocknet: https://www.flock.networkResumake: https://resumake.io/Streak: https://www.streak.com/Repl.it: https://repl.it/~Notion: https://www.notion.so/Gumroad: https://gumroad.com7) Canales de YouTube:Gaurav Sen: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRPMAqdtSgd0Ipeef7iFsKwGitLab Unfiltered https://www.youtube.com/c/GitLabUnfiltered/videosCoderos: https://www.youtube.com/c/Coderos/videosLa Resistencia: https://www.youtube.com/c/LaResistenciaCero/videos#GraciasAkira: https://youtu.be/BYQ6OB8HGDwVillage Global: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdZxojNw026cW3RuA-B1f7w/videosStartupfood: https://www.youtube.com/user/StartupfoodThe Knowledge Project: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKnowledgeProject/videos

Melissa Perri is the CEO of Produx Labs, a product management consultancy, and the author of “Escaping the Build Trap.” She believes the key to creating great products is growing great product leaders. We talked about: Misunderstanding value Why product management is mostly about leadership The difference between change agents and product managers. Which are you? Her strategic deployment framework how I’m trying to escape the build trap And most importantly, what to do instead of trying to come in, insult everyone, and change the product culture of a company over night. Yeah…exactly what I’m thinking. More about Melissa: The book: Escaping the Build TrapMelissa’s websiteOn Twitter: @lissijeanProduct InstituteCPO Accelerator Get on the email list at helpingsells.substack.com

Los productos SaaS cambian constantemente para que se perciban novedades, para ir más rápido que la competencia, para que se corrijan pronto los errores y no se introduzcan nuevos, etc. Para poder llegar a construir un producto SaaS hay que pasar por una serie de etapas de forma organizada antes de hacer la salida a producción y cada una de estas fases tiene una serie de implicaciones dependiendo de la robustez de nuestro sistema. Muchas veces no profundizamos con todo nivel de detalle y para resolver un problema mediante algoritmos debemos tener muy claro cuál es ese problema. En este episodio de SaaS Product Chat hablamos de las labores previas a la implementación del código para entender eso que tenemos que construir y descomponemos cada una de las fases del ciclo de vida de un producto SaaS.¡Gracias por escucharnos!Estos son los enlaces a los temas de los que hemos hablado:El ciclo de vida de un sistema de información: https://elvex.ugr.es/idbis/db/docs/lifecycle.pdfHow to Solve It: https://www.amazon.es/How-Solve-Mathematical-Princeton-Science/dp/069111966XHeurística: https://blog.thedojo.mx/2019/10/03/el-arte-de-resolver-problemas-la-heuristica.htmlHistorias de usuario: https://www.atlassian.com/es/agile/project-management/user-storiesRamificaciones en Git: https://git-scm.com/book/es/v2/Ramificaciones-en-Git-¿Qué-es-una-rama%3FEl ciclo de DevOps: https://www.genbeta.com/desarrollo/el-ciclo-de-devops-una-guia-para-iniciarse-en-las-fases-que-lo-componenEl backlog del producto: https://www.atlassian.com/es/agile/scrum/backlogsFases para la creación de un programa: http://prograinformatica.blogspot.com/p/fases-para-la-creacion-de-un-programa.htmlEscaping the Build Trap: https://www.amazon.es/Escaping-Build-Trap-Melissa-Perri/dp/149197379XMelissa Perri - Avoid the Build Trap: https://productized.medium.com/productized-notes-escaping-the-build-trap-by-melissa-perri-de0a274a4feaTodd Olson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddaolson/The Product-Led Organization: https://www.pendo.io/the-product-led-organization/Documento de Amazon: https://www.quora.com/What-is-Amazons-approach-to-product-development-and-product-managementLibro - La Guía Startup: https://gumroad.com/l/laguiastartup/saasproductchatPuedes encontrarnos en twitter como:Danny Prol: https://twitter.com/DannyProl/Claudio Cossio: https://twitter.com/ccossioEstamos en todas estas plataformas:Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/saas-product-chat/id1435000409ListenNotes: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/saas-product-chat-daniel-prol-y-claudio-CABZRIjGVdP/Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/36KIhM0DM7nwRLuZ1fVQy3Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS8zN3N0Mzg2dg%3D%3D&hl=esBreaker: https://www.breaker.audio/saas-product-chatWeb: https://saasproductchat.com/

Augusta Deluca, Group Product Manager na Bionexo e Juliana Carvalho, Senior Product Manager na Loggi conversaram com a gente sobre o que pensam a respeito de cultura de produto. Falamos sobre o papel da cultura dentro das empresas e como as product managers podem atuar para iniciar essa discussão dentro das empresas! Livros e podcasts citados no episódio Escaping the Build Trap, Melissa Perri Podcast Entrelaçadas: Como sobreviver a crise? Cursos PM3 apoia esse podcast e dá 10% de desconto pra quem nos ouve, com opção de parcelamento de 6 e 12 vezes com o cupom MDP10! Aproveitem :) Nós adoramos receber sugestões e feedbacks! É só mandar mensagem para podcastmdp@gmail.com. Siga a gente no Instagram e no Linkedin! Assine a Newsletter! Faça parte da comunidade Mulheres de Produto no Slack! E até o próximo episódio ❤

Derek O’Carroll is the CEO of Brightpearl, a retail operations platform for retailers and wholesalers. Derek worked with many startups and has made many exits in his career. He got involved with Brightpearl when it wasn’t profitable and is here to talk to us about how he facilitated Brightpearl’s turnaround. Derek details the process he went through to evaluate what was working and what wasn’t, to get rid of unprofitable customers, and the key project that he started when he first joined the company. Tune in to learn the impacts of changing pricing and customer focal point on Brightpearl’s churn and dollar retained revenue, as well as the strategies Brightpearl uses to get new customers.  During this interview, we discuss:  1:08 – A bit about Derek’s background   3:00 – Introducing the turnaround of Brightpearl  3:30 – What is Brightpearl and why did Derek choose to work for Brightpearl?   5:09 – How Derek identified companies in markets that could be disrupted  6:33 – The size and scope of Brightpearl: Now & Then  9:14 – How to win $100 just for listening to this podcast!  10:16 – The strategies they’re using to get new clients   13:01 – How Derek evaluated what was working and what wasn’t working at Brightpearl  15:20 – Adjusting pricing + Getting rid of unprofitable customers  17:30 – Changing the culture to drive profitability  18:27 – The key project that Derek started when he joined Brightpearl  19:50 – Big takeaways from that project  22:18 – Impacts of changing pricing and customer focal point on churn and dollar retained revenue  24:08 – What they changed within their engineering team to control the growth of legacy  26:27 – What is Derek’s dream business superpower?  28:22 – Derek shares his favorite growth driver.  28:58 – His most recommended books  29:30 – How to get in touch with Derek  Plus, a whole lot more!  Derek's Websites: Follow Derek on Twitter Brightpearl Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri Rubicon by Tom Holland ————————-  If you enjoyed this episode, please RATE / REVIEW and SUBSCRIBE to ensure you never miss an episode.  Connect with Dennis Brown   AskDennisBrown.com  LinkedIn  Twitter  Instagram [Free Giveaways] 

Mais um episódio bônus! Agora com a Melissa Perri, que é autora do livro Escaping the Build Trap, CEO do Produx Labs, além de dar aula de product management no MBA de Harvard. Falamos rapidamente sobre seu livro, cultura de produto, o papel de agilidade em empresas menos projetizadas e mais produtizadas, depois ela fez uma projeção do que espera para os próximos anos em product management, liderança, diversidade e concluímos com várias recomendações de livros que ela leu recentemente. (As respostas estão em inglês, então você pode reduzir a velocidade do podcast caso prefira. O vídeo da entrevista está disponível no nosso canal do Youtube https://bityli.com/mGnlJ) Dicas da Melissa: https://linktr.ee/produtopelomundo Agradecimento especial para as três Product Managers que enviaram ótimas perguntas pra gente: Bruna: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brugome/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brugome/) Heloisa: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heloisapiccirilli/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/heloisapiccirilli/) Vitoria: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vitorialakiss/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/vitorialakiss/) O podcast Produto pelo mundo é uma produção da mnemônica, com apresentação de Guilherme Seabra e edição de Pedro Moleiro. Não deixe de seguir nossa página no LinkedIn para acompanhar outros conteúdos e mandar suas sugestões: https://www.linkedin.com/company/produtopelomundo/ (https://www.linkedin.com/company/produtopelomundo/)

O Bloco de Notas é uma nova série na programação do Podcast Mulheres de Produto, que tem como proposta compilar ideias e conceitos dos principais livros da área de produto. E para estrear a série, selecionamos o livro da Melissa Perri, referência em Produto. Ela escreveu o livro Escaping the Build Trap, que numa tradução livre seria algo como Escapando da armadilha da construção. - Como uma gestão de produtos efetiva pode criar valor. Apresentação e Edição: Erica Castro Depoimentos: Talita Morais e Cíntia Ribeiro Cursos PM3 apoia esse podcast e dá 10% de desconto pra quem nos ouve, com opção de parcelamento de 6 e 12 vezes com o cupom MDP10! Aproveitem :) Recadinhos: Ajude a evoluirmos esta série! Responda nossa pesquisa. É rapidinho! Nós adoramos receber sugestões e feedbacks! É só mandar mensagem para podcastmdp@gmail.com. Siga a gente no Instagram e no Linkedin! Assine a Newsletter! Faça parte da comunidade Mulheres de Produto no Slack! E até o próximo episódio ❤

Not enough people in the SaaS world are customer-obsessed, but Derek O’Carroll, CEO of Brightpearl is changing that, and he joins us today to dive into how. Brightpearl is a scalable retail operations platform designed specifically for high growth multi-channel retailers wishing to automate and integrate their e-commerce and accounting operations. Derek got into startups in the 90s and while Senior Vice President of Global Field Sales and Marketing for Norton under Symantec he was responsible for $1.7 billion in global revenue. Today, Derek talks about leaving Symantec to join Brightpearl after looking for an area in the market that was undergoing disruption with a good product but challenges on product/market fit. He gets into what exactly Brightpearl does, how they make money, their deal client types, and their amazing growth metrics since he joined the team. After that, we turn our attention to how Derek manages teams with a focus on communication and the benefits of this approach, before zooming further into one of the biggest takeaways for today: how Brightpearl differentiates themselves by locating functional and non-functional attributes to build into their product. Here Derek talks about the process they went through to arrive at fast deployment, pricing, customer success, and automation. Next up, we chat about changes in customer behavior post-COVID and Brightpearl’s swift response to it, before wrapping things up with our usual rapid-fire questions for our guest. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:41] Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate, review, and subscribe to the Leveling Up Podcast! [00:50] Startups in B2B/e-commerce Derek was involved in leading up to Brightpearl. [02:21] Complexities Brightpearl manages around the process after a product is bought online. [02:57] The transparent, configurable subscription model Brightpearl uses to make money. [03:56] Brightpearl’s clients: merchants trading across multiple channels with above $1M GMV. [04:30] The thread running through Derek’s projects; differentiation in disruptive spaces. [06:31] Derek’s approach to managing teams focussing on optimizing communication. [10:09] Statistics of Brightpearl’s yearly order value, market location, revenue, and more. [12:00] Functional and non-functional differentiators of Brightpearl’s product. [15:10] Time to value and how Brightpearl’s deployment speed frees client resources. [16:48] The fluidity of customer behavior post-COVID and how Brightpearl has dealt with that.  [20:49] Tools Derek recently added to optimize his business: Slack and Donut. [21:44] A book recommendation from Derek.   Resources From The Interview:   Derek O’Carroll Brightpearl Derek O’Carroll on Twitter Derek O’Carroll Email Symantec Norton   Escaping the Build Trap   Jeff Bezos Oura Ring Peloton Slack Donut   Must read book: Rubicon     Leave Some Feedback:     What should I talk about next? Who should I interview? Please let me know on Twitter or in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review here Subscribe to Leveling Up on iTunes Get the non-iTunes RSS Feed     Connect with Eric Siu:      Growth Everywhere Single Grain Eric Siu on Twitter    

Joe Krebs speaks with Melissa Perri about product management and why a customer centric approach is so critical for example by distinguishing output from outcome Melissa wrote “Escaping the Build Trap” and is the keynote speaker for Agile 2022.

In this episode,Melissa and I speak about her book with the title "Escaping the Build Trap" and the keynote she is going to deliver at the www.agileday2019.org on NOV 14, 2019. In this podcast, you will hear her share her opinion about output vs. outcome, a customer-centric approach, the role of product managers and product owners. We taker a deeper dive and explored the career path of product management in more detail as well.

This episode is about how to build an organization that itself builds great products, especially great software products. I am absolutely not exaggerating when I say that this is the most important and under appreciated topic in the world today. It will some day be impossible for a company to thrive without these skills and we as a society are still figuring out how to organize human enterprises into productive software-making machines. It does NOT come naturally and I believe Marc Andreessen when he says that software will eat the world. That means that if your organization doesn't learn how to produce great software it, too, will be eaten and you along with it. Melissa Perri lives at the cutting edge of software process design and runs a consultancy devoted to building great product leaders. This of course applies to non-software products but the day is approaching when there is no such thing as a non-software product. Listen to this episode and continue on your journey to being a better producer of software, either as a coder or as an enabler of the programmers that build the products your company sells!Thanks for listening! Show notes at notunreasonable.com

On this episode of Build, Maggie sits down with Melissa Perri, product management and UX expert and author of Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value. Maggie and Melissa dive deep and explore what the build trap is and what it means for product managers, plus how product management teams can get out of the build trap and drive real business value – not feature factories. Want to hear Melissa's two best pieces of advice for PMs? Listen to the full episode.

Is your company falling behind competitors, no matter how many new product iterations you launch? Do you find yourself thinking, “This new feature is useless, but I have to deliver it to get a bonus”? If so, you may be stuck in the build trap by focusing on shipping features and developing ideas instead of on the actual value you can produce for customers. Escaping the Build Trap shows you how to shift a reactive project factory at risk of disruption into a successful product-focused organization creating products that customers love.

Melissa Perri is the author of Escaping the Build Trap and founder of Produx Labs, a product management consulting company that helps organizations transform their processes from top to bottom. This week on the Product Science Podcast, we talk about how product and tech can work together to maximize synergy, how to avoid the traps that lie in wait for growth-stage and enterprise companies, and how Melissa's unique background helped her succeed in product. Read the show notes for this episode to learn more.

Melissa Perri is a Product Management coach and consultant, and founder & CEO of Produx Labs.   She has trained organizations and teams on Product Management best practices and has spoken at more than 30 conferences in 14 different countries.  Melissa is also author of “Escaping the Build Trap” as well as launching her own school, Product Institute, in 2016. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil’s guest on today’s show is Melissa Perri.  She is the CEO of Produx Labs, a Product Management consultancy, training, and coaching firm. In 2016, she started the Product Institute, which is a 10-week online course, which anyone can take. She also developed and taught the product management section for generalassemb.ly. Over the years, she has spoken at numerous conferences, including Mind the Product, QCon and Lean UX NYC. In 2018, her book “Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value” was published. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (1.09) – So Melissa, can I ask you to expand on that brief intro and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Melissa starts out by explaining that she works pretty much on a daily basis with the C suite of growth stage companies, mostly CEOs, Chief Product Officers, and CTOs. Her primary role is to help them to work out how to scale their organizations. It is a very fast paced environment, with new people are joining them every day. So, they need to standardize their procedures as much as possible. Melissa’s company, Produx Labs, also has a partnership with Insight Partners, a venture capitalist company. The rest of the time Melissa works with larger organizations helping them to transform the way they work. Her company works with the executive management team then moves on to training their product managers. This gives her the chance to get involved in solving interesting problems at all levels. (2.37) – Can you please share a unique career tip with the I.T. career audience? Melissa’s advice is to always go somewhere you can find someone to teach you. Joining Google as an intern is much better than taking on the role of product manager at a startup. If you work for a well-established firm, they will be in a position to take you under their wing and teach you. (3.23) – So, do you have any specific advice for anybody who may be looking to get into product management? Getting into the field is still tricky. Right now, there is no clear path. If you have been working with an organization for a while you will likely be offered the role. Or a startup will be desperate to fill the position, so will hire you even if you have relatively little experience. Until now, that has been the fastest way into that particular role. Moving forwards, Melissa and a number of her colleagues, are trying to change that situation. They are working on setting up an apprenticeship path or associate pm model. But, right now, her recommendation is to find and follow one of the great product leaders. Choose someone you really admire, reach out to them and learn from them. The other route is to work in an adjacent field, for example, user research or UX. Once you are established, make it known that you want to learn more about the product side of things and take it from there. (4.35) - In terms of the evolution that's going on around product delivery, is the area of product management growing as well? Yes, it is probably one of the most in-demand jobs there is, at the moment. Yet, it is still hard to figure out how to break into this very well paid field of technology. (5.20) – Can you tell us about your worst career moment? And what you learned from that experience. A few years ago, Melissa became the product manager for a marketing platform. She had some experience and had just started to teach others about the field. So, she was pretty confident she knew the right way of doing things. Unfortunately, her CEO did not see things her way. Like most founders, the CEO wanted things done their way. At the time, Melissa did not really have the skills to explain things in a way that would enable her to “bring them along on the journey”. She just butted heads with everyone and got upset when nobody appeared to be listening to the customers. It was a pretty awful experience. But, after 6 months she started to learn how to change her approach. Today, she always tries to see things from the other person’s perspective and adjust her approach accordingly. These days, she works hard to take people with her rather than try to push them down a certain path. She sells to them instead of using brute force. (7.49) – What was your best career moment? For Melissa that was when she had an epiphany moment, fairly early in her career. At the time she was working in a traditional work environment. The CEO would come up with an idea and ask the development team to build it, which, naturally is exactly what they would do. Nobody would stop and ask if that is really what the customer wanted. At the time, Melissa was learning about how to experiment with users as a way to better understand what they really wanted. The firm she was working for agreed to try some of these experiments. It proved to be a very good move indeed. For the first time, the CEO and the rest of the team had hard data that proved what the end customer wanted and what they did not. The CEO recognized the true value of doing things this way. Even though it meant his decisions were being questioned and challenged. It was these experiments that set Melissa on the successful product management career path she is now following. She was also able to position herself as a leader within the organization. Having access to the data made it much easier to have a frank and open discussion and make the right decisions. Often, the data made the argument for Melissa. (10.53) – Can you tell us what excites you about the future of the IT industry and careers? The fact that the technology sector is becoming more dynamic is something Melissa welcomes and finds exciting. New roles are emerging. The creation of UX and UI managers, data analysts and engineers is making a huge difference to how effective developers and product managers can be. These changes are also enabling more people to get involved in the technology field. (11.50) – Are there any particular technologies that interest you or any particular direction that technology is going in? Melissa is particularly interested in the way ethics are starting to play a role in how products are developed. In the past, everyone’s time and energy went into solving the technical problems with very little consideration being given to the social ramifications of what they were doing. That is starting to change. (12.59) – What drew you to a career in IT? Melissa remembers her dad bringing home a magazine with Bill Gates on the front. It was then that her dad first encouraged her to become a computer programmer. She was very young, but it struck a cord. Her uncle worked for Microsoft and she knew she enjoyed playing with computers, so she was actually quite keen to follow her father’s advice. Melissa ended up studying to become an engineer. A lot of her friend’s got involved in the investment banking and financial side. But, she was always fascinated by the technical side of things and wanted to build the products rather than use them. (14.34) – What is the best career advice you have ever received? When she graduated from college she sat in front of a panel and was asked what phase of her career she was on. Was she ready to learn or earn? The panel pointed out that she still did not know that much, so suggested that she might be better off taking positions that would help her to build up her knowledge quickly, at least at that stage of her career. It was very good advice. Even today she makes sure that she is learning continuously. She pushes herself to go in directions that push here to try and learn new things. (15.45) – If you were to begin your IT career again, right now, what would you do? Melissa left college and immediately started working for a major bank in a developer role. It was a very slow paced environment, so she learned very little. She did not have a mentor either. If she were to start her career again she would not dismiss the idea of getting a job where she could have a mentor, or maybe working for a startup. A role that would have pushed her and provided her with an outlet for the energy and enthusiasm every new developer has. (17.16) – What are you currently focusing on in your career? Right now, Melissa is trying to learn more about domains she is not yet familiar with. For example, last year, she got involved in learning about pricing and packaging. She is also trying to get a seat on a company board. (18.14) – What is the number one non-technical skill that has helped you the most in your IT career? Executive presence is Melissa’s number on non-technical skill. If you want to get into leadership you need to work on your executive presence from day one. You need to be a good presenter and sway people with your ideas and data. It is very important to adapt your style to suit your audience, so you can reach them. (19.37) – Phil asks Melissa to share a final piece of career advice with the audience. Once again, Melissa echoes her early advice, which is to go somewhere you can learn. BEST MOMENTS: (2.51) MELISSA – "Always go somewhere where you can learn from somebody who is already there." (4.38) MELISSA – "Product management is a growing field. It’s also one of the highest paid fields in the technology industry." (7.19) MELISSA – “Always try to approach it from the perspective of the other person." (14.52) MELISSA – "Are you ready to earn? Or are you ready to learn? Which phase of your career are you on? " (18.37) MELISSA – "If you want to get into leadership, the thing that you really need to hone and work on, from day one, is executive presence." CONTACT MELISSA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/lissijean LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissajeanperri/ Website: https://melissaperri.com/

  There are a lot of Product Management skills that a great Product Owner needs to learn about. One of the best teachers of those skills is ProduxLabs CEO, Melissa Perri. She has a brand new book all about product roles, skills, strategy, and creating product-led organizations. All of these ideas are intended to help get you and your company out of the Build Trap, a place where customer success takes a backseat to shipping features. PO’s will benefit from adopting the ideas that Melissa has around finding real problems that help the people who use our products, and the systems that create them.            Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Melissa Perri - @lissijean - produxlabs.com - melissaperri.com http://www.produxlabs.com/book/ https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2017/07/escaping-build-trap-melissa-perri/ https://uxpodcast.com/206-build-trap-melissa-perri/ TSSC - NUMIT Cheaper Better Faster: Toyota help feed Hurricane Sandy Victims John Cutler - Value and Flow

Melissa Perri is the CEO of Produx Labs and Author of Escaping the Build Trap: How effective product management creates value. She believes that as companies scale, they lose track of what makes them successful and they just “ship.” Companies forget to bring products back to the overall strategy and talk with their customers. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Melissa about getting out of the build trap and having a customer-centric culture.  Companies in the Build Trap - Software startup - Growing and trying to exit. Look for product managers early. Can get out of build trap.  - Enterprises - Haven’t scaled through software. Brings in others to be product managers. A new discipline. Struggles with build trap.  As companies scale, they are close to the customer. As they execute, they forget to talk to the customer. Athena Health developed a portal for user research with its customers.  Escaping the Build Trap Takeaways - Explains how to think about Product Management - Step-by-Step processes - Helps people understand what Product Management is and how to set it up.  - Helps managers implement a system. Product Trends - More people understand discipline - Silicon Valley thought - You own software, streamline, talk to customers, and turn ideas into business models - Agile school of thought - Product owner vs. product managers - Similar roles Product Manager Role - Has authority on how to build, and sometimes on what to build. - Teaches product managers to question why. Can the team build it in a better way? Push back. Show why it should be different. For More Information: For more information on product management or to connect with Melissa, see http://www.produxlabs.com, https://melissaperri.com or on https://twitter.com/lissijean. You can find her book, Escaping the Build Trap on Amazon. If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: Ep. 119 – Voltage Control’s Douglas Ferguson on Inside Innovation, Ep. 99 – Ryan Jacoby with Machine & Author of Making Progress, and Ep. 90 – Teresa Torres with Product Talk. Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Melissa Perri is the CEO of Products Labs and Author of Escaping the Build Trap: How effective product management creates value. She believes that as companies scale, they lose track of what makes them successful and they just “ship.” Companies forget to bring products back to the overall strategy and talk with their customers. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Melissa about getting out of the build trap and having a customer-centric culture.  Companies in the Build Trap - Software startup - Growing and trying to exit. Look for product managers early. Can get out of build trap.  - Enterprises - Haven’t scaled through software. Brings in others to be product managers. A new discipline. Struggles with build trap.  As companies scale, they are close to the customer. As they execute, they forget to talk to the customer. Athena Health developed a portal for user research with its customers.  Escaping the Build Trap Takeaways - Explains how to think about Product Management - Step-by-Step processes - Helps people understand what Product Management is and how to set it up.  - Helps managers implement a system. Product Trends - More people understand discipline - Silicon Valley thought - You own software, streamline, talk to customers, and turn ideas into business models - Agile school of thought - Product owner vs. product managers - Similar roles Product Manager Role - Has authority on how to build, and sometimes on what to build. - Teaches product managers to question why. Can the team build it in a better way? Push back. Show why it should be different. For More Information: For more information on product management or to connect with Melissa, see http://www.produxlabs.com, https://melissaperri.com or on https://twitter.com/lissijean. You can find her book, Escaping the Build Trap on Amazon. If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: Ep. 119 – Voltage Control’s Douglas Ferguson on Inside Innovation, Ep. 99 – Ryan Jacoby with Machine & Author of Making Progress, and Ep. 90 – Teresa Torres with Product Talk. Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Jorgen Hesselberg and Steven Wolff on Agile Amped, Melissa Perri on Agile Uprising, Eric Elliott on Simple Leadership, Liz Keogh on Being Human, and Alex Schladebeck on Test Talks. I'd love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting March 4, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the week when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. JORGEN HESSELBERG AND STEVEN WOLFF ON AGILE AMPED The Agile Amped podcast featured Jorgen Hesselberg and Steven Wolff with host Howard Sublett. I liked what Steven had to say about how new norms can come into being simply through inaction and how we want to be more intentional about creating norms. This comment reminded me of the discussion of norms in the book Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change by Grenny et al., a book I highly recommend. In my own work, I use working agreements with my team to intentionally develop team norms and hold each other accountable for them. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/change-the-norms-to-change-the-culture/id992128516?i=1000429382285&mt=2 Website link: https://solutionsiq.podbean.com/e/change-the-norms-to-change-the-culture/ MELISSA PERRI ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Melissa Perri with hosts Colleen Johnson, Troy Lightfoot, and Chris Murman. This episode caught my attention because I enjoyed Melissa’s last appearance on Agile Uprising which motivated me to pre-order her book The Build Trap back in November last year. I learned a lot from the book and it introduced me to the book The Art Of Action by Stephen Bungay, which I talked about in the last podcast episode. I liked Melissa’s description of product managers as bad idea terminators. I see this as more of a behavior during the convergent thinking phase of product design. Lack of focus is definitely a problem I see on product teams, so I can appreciate the idea of having someone to keep people focused on the most valuable problems to solve. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/escaping-the-build-trap-w-melissa-perri/id1163230424?i=1000429120613&mt=2 Website link: https://agileuprising.libsyn.com/podcast/escaping-the-build-trap-w-melissa-perri ERIC ELLIOTT ON SIMPLE LEADERSHIP The Simple Leadership podcast featured Eric Elliott with host Christian McCarrick. I appreciated Eric’s comment about the myth of the individual contributor engineer because I have seen developers being judged on simple, easy-to-measure metrics like closed ticket counts when a more appropriate metric would be one that takes into account their time spent mentoring and the benefits that such mentoring had on the team. Over the long term, I have seen the damage that judging engineers by closed ticket count does to a culture where everybody is incentivized to work in their individual silo and almost no mentoring takes place even from senior engineers for whom mentoring and coaching should be, in my opinion, a large part of their day. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-culture-can-help-your-teams-scale-with-eric-elliott/id1260241682?i=1000429163879&mt=2 Website link: http://simpleleadership.io/how-culture-can-help-you-scale-with-eric-elliott/ LIZ KEOGH ON BEING HUMAN The Being Human podcast featured Liz Keogh with host Richard Atherton. Liz talked about the Cynefin framework, psychological safety, and real options. I particularly liked her story of a team that invested in making changes easily reversible by creating a rollback mechanism for when a production release goes awry. She remarked on how this technical safety net provided psychological safety as well. I also liked her description of real options, which I have recently been reading about in the book Commitment by Olav Maassen, Chris Matts, and Chris Geary. Liz told a story about how conference organizers gave themselves options by over-ordering on the engraved trophies. The very affecting second half of this podcast episode was focused on the #metoo movement. Liz shared her experiences of being harassed and Richard confessed to his own poor behavior. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/47-1-complexity-2-exploring-metoo-with-liz-keogh/id1369745673?i=1000429964823&mt=2 Website link: http://shoutengine.com/BeingHuman/47-1-complexity-2-exploring-metoo-with-liz-keogh-73971 ALEX SCHLADEBECK ON TEST TALKS The Test Talks podcast featuring Alex Schladebeck with host Joe Colantonio. The title of the episode, “How to Listen to Your Tests”, immediately caught my attention since I have been encouraging co-workers to develop this skill ever since I read Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided By Tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce, even going so far as to create a 10-minute YouTube video tutorial on how to Listen To The Tests last April. Joe and Alex talked about how she applies her training in linguistics in her career in software testing. It turns out that such training was actually helpful as it taught her how to move back and forth between detailed and abstract ways of thinking. They got into a discussion of test data management, which Alex likened to continuous integration because it is something that starts out being painful when you don’t address it often enough or when you push it onto the testers and it becomes easier the more often you pay attention to it and when you make it everyone’s responsibility. I also liked Alex’s story of a pelican encounter on an early-morning run coming to represent to her the unknown unknowns that exploratory testing helps you discover. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/240-how-to-listen-to-your-tests-with-alex-schladebeck/id826722706?i=1000429560907&mt=2 Website link: https://www.joecolantonio.com/testtalks/240-alex-schladebeck/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

The build trap is something many organisations fall into. Building features for the sake of building them. Melissa Perri, author of Escaping the build trap joins us to talk about what organisations and product managers can do to avoid it. Do you know why you design and build the things you do? Often we are designing... The post #206 The build trap with Melissa Perri appeared first on UX Podcast.

Jesse Fewell on Drunken PM, Dave Dame on Agile For Humans, Stephen Bungay on Boss Level, Julia Wester on SPAMCast, and Matty Stratton on Greater Than Code. I'd love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting February 18, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the week when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. JESSE FEWELL ON DRUNKEN PM The Drunken PM podcast featured Jesse Fewell with host Dave Prior. Dave and Jesse talked about the role of the Project Management Office (PMO) in organizations that are transitioning to Agile methods. Jesse talked about the invitation-orientation of the Agile PMO as defined in the Project Management Body Of Knowledge (PMBOK) in which the PMO acts to support teams as they learn to become agile. Dave brought up that most people he has spoken to from PMOs want everyone in the organization to “do Agile” the same way, which Jesse described as management junk food. This led to a further discussion about why people want consistency and why most of their reasons are due to misunderstandings and anti-patterns like optimizing resource efficiency over flow efficiency. They also delved into some of my favorite topics: the leadership circle concept from Anderson and Adams, the competing values framework, and Carol Dweck’s ideas around fixed and growth mindsets. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/evolving-role-pmo-in-agile-organization-catching-up/id1121124593?i=1000428696329&mt=2 Website link: http://drunkenpm.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-evolving-role-of-pmo-in-agile.html DAVE DAME ON AGILE FOR HUMANS The Agile For Humans podcast featured Dave Dame with host Ryan Ripley. Dave talked about growing up with cerebral palsy which led to a discussion about the opportunities brought about by improvements in accessibility in recent years. He talked about how a technology like Apple Pay that might seem like a relatively minor innovation to most people can be a complete game-changer for somebody with cerebral palsy as it lets them pay for something without having to trust a stranger to go into their wallet. He talked about how social media has given him a voice where in previous generations there just wouldn’t be the opportunity. Nowadays, he says, the biggest accessibility obstacles at work for him are not buildings lacking ramps and elevators, but the inaccessible nature of the company’s org charts. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/afh-105-agile-leadership-and-management-with-dave-dame/id991671232?i=1000429122862&mt=2 Website link: https://ryanripley.com/afh-105-agile-leadership-and-management-with-dave-dame/ STEPHEN BUNGAY ON BOSS LEVEL The Boss Level podcast featured Stephen Bungay with host Sami Honkonen. This episode is a few years old, but I recently finished reading Melissa Perri’s new book The Build Trap which referenced Stephen Bungay’s book The Art Of Action and I have been reading his work non-stop ever since, which got me interested in hearing more from him. I liked what he had to say about uncertainty’s central place in strategy and its distinction from risk. He also told a compelling story about a friend of his working in strategy at a UK retailer and how he went against the traditional rollout of store layout changes to all stores at once and instead rolled out changes a few stores at a time so that he could tweak the design as he went. This is something any entrepreneur would recognize as Lean Startup thinking, but it was completely foreign to the management of this retailer. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/stephen-bungay-and-strategy-under-uncertainty/id1041885043?i=1000376171555&mt=2 Website link: http://www.bosslevelpodcast.com/stephen-bungay-and-strategy-under-uncertainty/ MATTY STRATTON ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Matty Stratton with hosts Janelle Klein, Coraline Ehmke, and Jessica Kerr. They began the discussion by having Matty summarize his REdeploy conference talk ‘Fight, Flight, or Freeze – Releasing Organizational Trauma.’ Taking the idea of incidents and outages as a form of organizational trauma, Matty talked about the importance of being able to tell stories about your incident responses and how that helps the organization process the trauma. He cited John Allspaw regarding the idea that incident postmortems should ask questions that trigger conversations rather than give answers. Janelle brought up the point that the stories we tell are sometimes lies that cover up the trauma rather than address it when the environment of the organization lacks psychological safety. This brought them to a discussion of blameless postmortems and how a culture of blamelessness is so hard to build and so easy to lose. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/116-healing-organizational-trauma-with-matt-stratton/id1163023878?i=1000429285663&mt=2 Website link: http://www.greaterthancode.com/2019/02/06/116-healing-organizational-trauma-with-matt-stratton/ JULIA WESTER ON SPAMCAST The Software Process & Measurement podcast featured Julia Wester with host Thomas Cagley. Tom and Julia talked about the need for spectrum thinking, discussed the distinction between spectrum thinking and binary thinking, and then Julia described how she uses the Cynefin framework to identify whether or not a problem requires spectrum thinking. While this is a straightforward concept, I see binary thinking being applied all the time to address problems that require something more akin to spectrum thinking. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/spamcast-532-spectrum-thinking-interview-julia-wester/id213024387?i=1000429098317&mt=2 Website link: http://spamcast.libsyn.com/spamcast-532-spectrum-thinking-an-interview-with-julia-wester FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

To stay competitive in today’s market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs. On this episode of the Agile Uprising podcast; Colleen, Chris, and Troy sit down with Melissa Perri and discuss her new book "Escaping The Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value"  Links Contact Information Escaping The Build Trap Book Twitter: https://twitter.com/lissijean Websites MelissaPerri.com   ---- Support the Agile Uprising by making a contribution via patreon.com/agileuprising

Rich Mironov, author of The Art of Product Management, shares his experiences and advice around how product managers can approach the process of figuring out what an end user really wants, while managing a team of people with different perspectives on the same question. Rich is joining the curation team for this year’s Enterprise Experience Conference–read more about the new approach we’re taking this year: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/enterprise2019/updates/reaching-beyond-ux-sister-enterprise-silos/ Check out Rich’s book: The Art of Product Management: Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator https://www.mironov.com/book/ What Rich is reading now: Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri https://melissaperri.com/book/

Product Management expert Melissa Perri helps us to avoid some on the pitfalls of solution development and create products customers will love. The post MBA173: Avoiding the Build Trap appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.

Are you building what your customers want, or are you just building? Many companies, old and new alike, fall into “the Build Trap,” building feature after feature without stopping to validate whether it’s what customers truly want and need. Melissa Perri advocates for using product management to help companies get out of that trap, because product managers look at the company goals, set product goals in alignment with the overarching objectives, and ask, “Where do we optimize this? And do these products help meet our users’ needs?” The Agile Amped podcast series brings Agile news and events to life. Fueled by inspiring conversations, innovative ideas, and in-depth analysis of enterprise agility, Agile Amped provides on-the-go learning – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com.Subscribe: bit.ly/SIQYouTube, bit.ly/SIQiTunes, www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/Follow: bit.ly/SIQTwitterLike: bit.ly/SIQFacebook

On this episode of Build, Maggie sits down with Melissa Perri, product management and UX expert and author of Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value. Maggie and Melissa dive deep and explore what the build trap is and what it means for product managers, plus how product management teams can get out of the build trap and drive real business value – not feature factories. Want to hear Melissa's two best pieces of advice for PMs? Listen to the full episode.