Product Thinking

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

Melissa Perri welcomes Ezinne Udezue to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Ezinne is the CPO of WP Engine, a platform that provides solutions to create marketable sites and apps on WordPress, as well as the author of Product Management for Product-Led Growth, coming 2023. Melissa asks Ezinne what she thinks the key is to being a successful product leader, Ezinne shares her definition of product-led growth, and they discuss how product-led growth applies to B2B and Enterprise products, core PLG tactics, what PMs need to understand about marketing and how product collaborates with marketing and sales in a PLG company, and much more.  Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Ezinne explore: Her journey into product leadership. Product leaders are measured on impact, so they should be someone that people look up to. "It comes down to having a method…a way one thinks about product,"  Ezinne says. A key part of becoming a successful product manager is being able to explain your product to people in a way they can understand.  "You're combining all those signals and setting context and creating options, your ideas backlog, your product backlog, and then you're making a choice. That to me is what product strategy is," Ezinne tells Melissa.  Ezinne lists skills and attributes companies and product managers need to hone for successful product growth. Word of mouth marketing is an important component of product-led growth. People are more likely to come to you if you offer fast and efficient solutions to their problems.   With a product-led growth strategy, sales and marketing are able to focus on upselling instead of bombarding customers. They can focus on individuals who are already interested in the product. The first step to product-led growth is mapping out the customer journey. Identify market segments to attack and generate value. Since there are so many new companies emerging every day, acquiring a customer is difficult. Ezinne stresses being very intentional, and being creative about virality. Resources Ezinne Udezue | LinkedIn WP Engine

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about overlap between roles, pitfalls companies fall into while scaling, and to what extent a company should be product-led. Q: What overlap do you see between the role of Product Manager and UX Designer?  Q: What pitfalls have you seen companies fall into while they were scaling? What are the main principles to get right in this exciting yet challenging stage of company's growth? Q: To what extent should a company be product-led? Assuming that a company relies both on services and products, are there variances to what product-led means for such companies? Or does product-led mainly apply to companies where the product is the center of the business?  Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com

Melissa Perri welcomes Janna Bastow to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Janna is the founder of Mind the Product and the CEO and founder of ProdPad, which is software that helps manage your roadmap and product backlog. Janna and Melissa discuss the story of how ProdPad came to be and why Janna was inspired to build a more robust road mapping tool, how to become the most informed PM in your industry, the process behind creating the Now, Next, Later roadmap format and why it’s caught on, how to communicate with other teams both before and after you create your roadmap, and how to influence your leadership to evolve their processes and thinking around road mapping.  Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Janna talk about: Janna shares how ProdPad came to fruition. “Some of the immediate problems were the fact that we have to ask the same questions over and over again: Why are we doing this thing, what is this thing we're doing? What problem does it solve?”  Janna has always taken a collaborative approach to product management. She knows she doesn’t have all the answers, so she views her job as asking questions and using the knowledge of the people around her. When done right, product management is the most fun area of business. You get to play with different ideas, interact with different areas, and make decisions about what gets made. The Now-Next-Later roadmap focuses on prioritizing the most urgent tasks, identifying what needs to be done, and providing a framework for the scale of certain tasks, emphasizing sequence rather than time.  Many product managers prefer roadmaps in the style of Now-Next-Later because it doesn’t communicate time at all. They don’t want to be beholden to time estimations in anticipation of over-committing or not hitting deadlines. ProdPad is a mix of a coach and a SaaS tool designed to help you become a better product manager. It gives you a few key views in a non-exploitative format that allows you to view the order in which you are going to solve problems. One of the key things product managers can do to convince their leaders to adopt the Now-Next-Later roadmap is to speak their language; try to gain clarity on the core of their resistance. Resources Janna Bastow on the Web | LinkedIn | Twitter  ProdPad | Twitter

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about advocating for resources in a non-leadership role, whether or not a bottoms-up transformation can really work if leadership isn’t immediately on board, and how to effectively communicate with teams outside of product in order to set realistic expectations and get them on your side.  Q: As a product manager that is not in a leadership role, how do you recommend advocating for additional resources on your development? Q: Have you ever seen a product transformation work from bottoms-up, work at the team level first, and then improve at the executive level? If so, what do you think were the deciding factors? Q: How do I work with non-product teams who have no regard for prioritization or respect for the actual product team’s process? Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com

Ken Norton, an executive coach, discusses the evolution of product management and the difference between empowered and unempowered product teams. He emphasizes the need for experienced product leaders and suggests developing apprenticeship programs. The podcast also explores the challenges of transitioning from reactive to purpose-driven leadership and creating an environment for product people to thrive. Ken highlights the power of setting big goals and having a vision in inspiring and rallying teams.

This segment dives into the importance of creative thinking in product management, urging PMs to allocate time for reflection. It explores how to measure the value of platform changes through business outcomes. Melissa shares insights on rapidly prototyping personalized features without full product development, using concierge experiments and mock prototypes. Additionally, she discusses balancing outcome-focused and functional work by aligning priorities with strategic goals. Tune in for actionable advice that empowers product development!

Melissa Perri welcomes Giff Constable to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Giff is a product leader and former CPO of both Meet Up and Neo. Giff is passionate about helping product people sharpen their financial skills, which is a big topic of conversation in this episode. He talks to Melissa about why it’s key that product executives understand the nuances of financials, the most important relationships for a product executive to cultivate and how, why Giff never regrets investing time in the exercise of creating FP&A models, the ins and outs of understanding valuation, and so much more.  Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Giff explore: Giff talks about his career path and how he ended up in CPO and CEO roles. When communicating in a corporate space, adjust your language depending on who you're speaking to, with the goal of finding common ground.  Giff explains the FP&A model.  Nothing changes user behavior more than your pricing model. Adjust your pricing model so that the majority of your customers are satisfied. "When both the customer and the company are being successful together, everyone's reinvesting, everyone's happy," Giff tells Melissa. Product leaders should build a relationship with their teams. An easy way to do this is to involve them in decision-making. Trust is built. You don't have to do everything by yourself or work in silos.  Valuation has to do with what someone is willing to pay for what you have. Companies are valued with a multiple of their top or bottom line. Lower growth companies are valued in the multiple of the bottom line. Higher growth companies tend to be valued as a multiple of revenue. How fast or slow a company grows has to do with its product. If a company has poor prioritization or if there are market shifts, its product will become obsolete and contribute to slow growth for the company. For larger companies, there's also the risk of being so far ahead that you don't see who's catching up with you, and by the time you do, it's too late. Prioritization and paying attention to market trends and shifts are key. Resources Giff Constable | LinkedIn | Twitter

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about whether or not having clearly defined terms and a common language within an organization matters, how to convince founders to hand over the product reins and hire an interim CPO, and how to convince your team and leadership that you belong in your new role as Director of Product.  Q: Do you have any advice on how to establish a common language? Q: As a product consultant, what's the secret to convincing founders to give up control of a product that was a labor of love? How do you best convince a founder that having an interim CPO is worth the investment? Q: How can I build the trust of my team of four product managers and show leadership that they made the right choice with me? Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com

Melissa Perri welcomes John Athayde to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. John is a design team leader, strategist, and individual contributor, as well as VP of Design at PowerFleet. John and Melissa discuss how he shifted focus to the importance of internal tools at Living Social, how he got buy-in from leadership to prioritize internal tools, the process of creating a design system for a scaling organization, the benefits of design systems, design systems vs. style guides, and the tools and org structure he recommends to get set up for success.  Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and John talk about: What led John to PowerFleet. John shares how he started pushing for improved internal controls. “As I was working on the front-end screens, [I realized] we could make this a little better.” He convinced some product people and engineers, and they collaborated to do a bunch of mockups. They presented them to the CTO, who gave them his blessing. Designers should know how to code, or at least know how code happens, according to John. “You can’t design a building without knowing how a building is built.” You can use product thinking to design your internal tools. It’s less of just a design issue and more of an issue of creating a product, which is a complex internal operating system. This is necessary to actually scale. A UX engineer is a front-end developer who is primarily focused on the look and feel as opposed to functionality. They are the bridge between functionality and design. It's a person with the design sensibility who can speak code and help implement, but they're not doing the implementation. Now that almost everyone has some kind of experience with software, UX and UI have become more essential. Consumers are going to subconsciously compare their experience with your user interface with others. Every company needs a source of truth for their operations, that is, documentation for all the relevant information needed to continue operations. In the event of key people leaving, the work they did would still be there for the next person to take over. We often take for granted how important the role of a UX designer is in a high-growth organization. Resources John Athayde on LinkedIn | Twitter | Website