Product Thinking

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about relationships between program and product managers, the right questions to ask during the interview process so you end up in a company with strong product values, and how to experiment when iterating on complex hardware. Q: What does a great partnership between a product manager and a technical program manager look like? If my long-term career goal is to pivot back into product, how might I build up my product chops in this role in the short term without stepping on the toes of my product partner in crime?  Q: Do you have any suggestions for questions I can ask when interviewing for a new role to make sure that I don't fall into the same situation in the future? Q: Do you have any advice for how to do product discovery when you are working with high-end systems and prototyping and iterating are really expensive? Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com

Donna Lichaw and Melissa Perri discuss leadership coaching, imposter syndrome, and the power of storytelling in becoming the heroes of your own story. They highlight the challenges leaders face, the importance of self-awareness, and how to harness behaviors as superpowers for positive outcomes.

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about how to handle the unfortunate reality that oftentimes product managers are blamed for things out of their control, how to communicate to engineers when it’s time to pivot off of a project they’ve devoted a lot of time and effort towards, and how to build a shiny new product without completely disregarding all of the learnings from the original one. Q: What should your course of action be if you perceive yourself a scapegoat position in product management? Q: Have you ever had to pause a tool or product? Do you have any frameworks when making such decisions? To what degree is it my responsibility to communicate this as opposed to senior management? Q: How can we use our current product to help us build a better replacement? Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com

Josh Seiden and Melissa Perri discuss the challenges companies face in transitioning to an outcome-centric approach, emphasizing the importance of understanding impact and outcome. They highlight the significance of focusing on data, avoiding fixation on processes, and storytelling for shifting focus. Additionally, they explore the value of evidence-based decision-making, data-driven strategies, and creating psychological safety in organizations.

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about ways to research and stay on top of the market in order to conduct a thorough competitive analysis, when adopting a Stage Gate process makes sense and how to design it, and how to organize teams around the product strategy framework.  Q: What tips do you have for competitor analysis? Q: What is your experience with Stage Gate? Am I just being stubborn and intractable by thinking that adopting Stage Gate is the opposite of creating a product-led organization? Or, for example, a risk-led organization? Q: In your experience, would it make sense for each squad to have its own challenge, or should there be one or two challenges for the entire product area? Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com

Tara Scott discusses the importance of psychological safety in the workplace with Melissa Perri. Topics include assessing safety in organizations, the impact of micromanagement on morale, leading with curiosity, and fostering open communication for productive teams.

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about the importance of hiring a more experienced product leader to help more junior product managers steer clear of bad product habits, how to organize and manage an influx of ideas from different stakeholders, why product shouldn’t be part of the IT organization, and where project managers fit in a product led team.  Q: What are the chances of a junior PM unintentionally developing unhealthy habits without the ongoing regular guidance of an experienced PM? What are key signals that might indicate it's time for me to ask my leadership team to bring in a product leader? Q: Any tips for setting up a structure for managing ideas? Q: Why shouldn’t product be part of the IT organization? What are the key talking points you would hit when trying to convince the company that products should be its own organization? Q: Does project management or the business analyst role belong in a product lead or empowered product team? If a large company is undergoing a transformation, where would you see people who have traditionally played the role of project manager or BA succeed? Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com

Melissa Perri welcomes Becky Flint to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Becky is the Founder and CEO of Dragonboat, the responsive portfolio platform for product and technology leaders, and is an expert in outcome-focused product practice and operations. Becky joins Melissa to discuss how she recognized the need for a portfolio management tool like Dragonboat, why portfolio management should be adopted by any size team, common pitfalls in early portfolio management, why it’s the next iteration of agile, and how to implement a portfolio management practice into an organization.  Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Becky talk about: Becky’s journey into product and how Dragonboat came about. Portfolio management is not just for large companies or about how you create a hierarchy. It’s about how you make a decision across the product organization to support various needs and lenses of the business. Product operations ensures that people work at a consistent output - this consistency needs to be to an extent where effective decision making can happen. Melissa asks Becky about some mistakes people make with portfolio management. “When people think about portfolio management, they usually think about hierarchy,” Becky shares. “The challenge with hierarchy is that it’s static - once your business changes, you’re stuck. People forget the problem they’re trying to solve with the business when they spend so much time trying to figure out a hierarchy.” When companies started out trying to do agile and Scrum purely by the book, they encountered many difficulties because there was so much learning, evolving and adapting involved in those processes. You don’t need to roll out portfolios in every facet of your company - that would be way too time-consuming and tedious if you have multiple products. Rather, you can start in a few product areas. “Take one or two teams who are ready for change and start to apply portfolio management to areas that are somewhat independent,” Becky advises. No one can build a product alone, and no one can take it to market alone.  Becky and Melissa discuss why the role of Chief Product Officer is necessary. Becky says, “Having a leader driving the vision and strategy and enabling the team actually innovates and creates ideas, and makes them able to deliver.” Resources Becky Flint on the Web | LinkedIn | Twitter

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about what to expect when transitioning from a small to a large product team, how to work with subject matter experts that have strong opinions on product design, and making the case for creating an internal product team to support a growing organization.  Q: I've heard about the dangers of transitioning to a smaller team after being in a large organization, but I'm curious about movement in the other direction. Q: How can I help the team to make the most of everyone's expertise and work better together? Q: Do you have any suggestions for ways to frame a request to start an internal product team? Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com

Melissa Perri welcomes Gopal Erinjippurath to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Gopal is the co-founder, CTO and Head of Product at Sust Global, a company whose mission is to “develop data-driven products that enable every business decision to be climate-informed so that humanity can thrive in a changing planet.” Gopal joins Melissa to discuss climate sustainability and why climate data is proving to be valuable to all kinds of organizations, how he tested and iterated to build this complex data product, how he’s de-risking bets in a rapidly evolving market, the balance of being mission-driven and commercially minded, and the importance of making product thinking part of an organization’s DNA.  Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Gopal talk about: Gopal talks about his professional background, how he got into climate sustainability, and what led him to found his company, Sust Global. [1:29] Melissa asks Gopal what type of companies purchase climate data products and services and how they use them in a professional capacity. Your long-term strategy should include holding financial instruments that directly correlate to tangible assets. There are several physical climate risks related to these assets, so ask targeted questions about the climate to protect your assets. [5:26] Gopal shares how he was inspired to go into the business of climate-related data and insights. [8:29] Melissa asks how Sust Global tested their climate-based data product. Gopal explains that the first step was “to start with the outcome rather than the outputs and work backward from there.” Creating mockups of the data-based outcome and testing them with the early set of gated customers can provide valuable feedback. [10:42] Melissa asks Gopal how Sust Global ensures that their climate data product is of the highest quality. Gopal suggests that the best approach is to “sandbox the data capability into an area that one customer cares about and wants to decide on, and then provide them with that data in the simplest form so they can try it and use it for the first time.” [14:22] Your data should fit three criteria: temporal - how fresh your database and data product is  geographic - dimensionality of your dataset, how it's partitioned before it is handed to customers, and what interfaces there are  the business problem [16:26] Gopal highlights the challenges Sust Global faced when creating their product. [19:06] “You must enable your team to stay on top of things and…to fundamentally have product thinking be part of the DNA of your team,” Gopal says. [20:19] Gopal looks at capacity building, strategy and execution when he is building a data-based product team. [22:07] Climate change is a space where it is possible to stay mission-aligned and also be highly commercially minded, due to the rising importance of ESG and climate change initiatives. [24:54] Resources  Gopal Erinjippurath on LinkedIn  Sust Global | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram