How to create a winning product strategy | Melissa Perri
Melissa Perry, a product expert and Harvard Business School instructor, discusses common product team challenges, the importance of clear strategy and vision, and when to hire a CPO. She also introduces the emerging field of Product Operations.
Deep Dive Analysis
12 Topic Outline
Melissa Perri's Extensive Product Management Experience
Current Focus: Product Management Training and Education
Common Problems for Scaling SaaS Product Teams
When and How to Hire a Chief Product Officer (CPO)
The Role of a VP/Head of Product Before a CPO
When to Engage an Interim CPO or Consultant
Signs Your Team Lacks or Isn't Using a Strategy
Defining and Deploying a Comprehensive Company Strategy
Tactical Advice for Crafting a Product Vision
How Product Managers Can Improve Strategic Thinking
Introduction to Product Operations and Its Purpose
Avoiding Burnout from Overload of Product Management Advice
4 Key Concepts
Missing Middle (Strategy)
This refers to the gap between a company's high-level vision and objectives, and the day-to-day tactical work of product teams. When the 'missing middle' is present, teams work hard on features without clear connection to business outcomes, leading to stagnant metrics and a lack of executive understanding of product value.
Strategic Intents
These are the really big business movers or priorities a company sets for the next two to three years. Examples include going up/down market, expanding geographically, or innovating into new opportunities. They need to be clearly prioritized at the executive level to guide product portfolio decisions.
Product Operations
A function that helps product management scale by standardizing processes, providing insights, and streamlining operations. It ensures the right insights reach teams and helps standardize outputs and check-ins to keep strategy on track, covering internal data, customer research, and process standardization.
Product Vision
A concrete, lofty, and far-enough-away picture of where the company wants to be in 5-10 years, distinct from its current state and competitors. It should allow people to imagine the future, articulate how the company will be different, and also specify what the company will *not* do.
6 Questions Answered
Melissa Perri has worked with and helped probably north of 4,000 product managers through teaching, consulting, and various programs, approaching 5,000 at the time of the recording.
One of the biggest issues is at the pivotal scale-up phase, going from single to multi-product, where companies struggle to hire a great CPO, rethink their strategy, and focus/prioritize effectively. Another common problem is a lack of clear, deployed strategy, leading to teams working hard without moving key metrics.
Signs include executives or the board not knowing what's happening in tech/product, a lack of connection between team work and company strategy, difficulty hiring PMs, or a need for a singular leader to bring together product, design, and potentially engineering functions, especially as the company expands into multi-product strategies, new markets, or undergoes major transformations.
Signs include teams working excessively long hours with no movement in key metrics, product/tech being a 'black box' to executives, a 'missing middle' between tactical work and business outcomes, and a lack of alignment or differing answers across the organization when asked about the company's vision or goals.
PMs can improve by imagining what they would do if they were in a CPO's position, talking to people who understand the market and financials (like sales, leadership, or other departments), and analyzing how other successful companies developed their strategies.
The best approach is to focus on execution in their daily job, then analyze what's working and what's not. Identify specific areas for improvement, deep dive into those topics to fill skill gaps, and adapt frameworks or processes if they are not serving their needs, rather than rigidly adhering to them.
45 Actionable Insights
1. Prioritize Goals & Strategy
Before training your people, ensure clear goals and a deployed strategy are in place, as training without context on what to work towards is ineffective.
2. Rethink & Prioritize Strategy
At the scale-up phase, rethink your entire strategy, focusing on prioritization to avoid spreading resources too thin across existing customer requests and backlogs.
3. Define a Concrete Vision
A true company vision should be concrete and elaborative, not just a tagline; executives should be able to explain what it means and how it will manifest in the future.
4. Draft a Two-Page Strategy Memo
If strategy is unclear, have leaders write a two-page memo detailing company history, current state, market threats, competition, priorities, and what the company will and won’t do, along with prioritized strategic intents.
5. Connect Team Work to Vision
If executives don’t understand how individual team efforts contribute to the company’s vision, objectives, and goals, it signals a failure in correctly deploying the strategy.
6. Assess Team Strategic Alignment
To identify a lack of strategy deployment, ask individual teams what they’re working on, why it’s important, and how it connects to the overall strategy; a disconnect indicates a problem.
7. Align Executive Goals
When strategy is well-deployed and executives are aligned on common company goals, infighting among stakeholders significantly decreases, allowing for calm, objective trade-off discussions.
8. Objective Trade-Off Discussions
Foster a culture where strategic trade-offs are discussed objectively, based on shared business goals, rather than emotionally, to ensure decisions prioritize the company’s overall advancement.
9. Integrate Data, Research, Goals
Formulate strategy by integrating internal data, customer research, and company goals, always asking ‘how can we win?’ within the context of current capabilities and the long-term vision.
10. Strategy: Start with Data
For leaders setting strategy, begin by gathering comprehensive data from all available sources (internal systems, user analytics, financials) to make informed decisions.
11. Make Strategic Choices
Embrace the necessity of making strategic choices even without 100% certainty, as waiting for perfect information can hinder progress.
12. Informed Decisions & Pivoting
As a leader, make the best informed decisions possible at the time, but also be willing to correct course and pivot if new information indicates the initial choice was incorrect.
13. Concise Strategy Documentation
Document your strategy in concise, two-page memos (not 20-page PRDs) for each level (executive, product leadership, teams) to clearly explain ‘what’ and ‘why,’ fostering better understanding and alignment.
14. Link Strategy Documents
Store strategy documents (e.g., in Google Docs or a wiki) and link them together so that anyone can easily navigate and understand the connections from tactical work up to the overarching company vision.
15. Combine Visuals for Vision
When articulating a vision, combine written descriptions with visual elements like presentations, prototypes, or diagrams to make it more concrete and easily understandable for different audiences.
16. Vision: Articulate Differentiation
When crafting a vision, explicitly state how your company will be different from competitors and why it will be better, moving beyond generic statements like ‘be the best.’
17. Vision: Define What Not To Do
Include what your company will not do or be in your vision statement; this clarity helps prevent copying competitors and focuses efforts on unique strategic paths.
18. Iterative & Testable Vision
A good vision is lofty enough that it requires iteration, testing, and continuous discovery to figure out how to achieve it, rather than being a single, easily attainable goal.
19. Uncover Implicit Strategy
To identify an unwritten strategy, interrogate leaders by asking what good/bad looks like, what impact specific releases will have, and what behaviors or numbers will change.
20. Study Company Strategies
To improve your strategic understanding, analyze how other successful companies developed and executed their strategies, learning from their journey from point A to point B.
21. Cross-Departmental Market Insights
Engage with other departments like sales to understand market dynamics, competitor wins/losses, and customer needs, leveraging their wealth of knowledge to inform your strategy.
22. Practice CPO Strategic Thinking
To improve strategic thinking, imagine what you would do if you were in a CPO’s position, even without the formal role, and use this to ask questions and dig into data.
23. Learn Strategy from Experts
To get better at strategy, talk to people who deeply understand the market and financials, including your CPO, to learn their processes, analysis methods, and how they arrive at strategic priorities.
24. Hire Data Analysts for Strategy
To support strategy formulation, hire data analysts or ex-consultants who are skilled at crunching data, pulling numbers, and identifying patterns to inform decisions.
25. Implement Product Operations
Implement Product Operations to scale product management by standardizing processes, ensuring teams receive the right insights, and maintaining alignment with strategy through consistent check-ins.
26. Product Ops: Internal Data
A key function of Product Operations is to surface internal data from financial systems and user analytics, making it accessible for teams to monitor strategic progress and track OKRs.
27. Product Ops: Customer Research
Product Operations streamlines customer and market research by standardizing approaches, ensuring efficient data collection, and preventing redundant customer outreach.
28. Product Ops: Scale User Research
Product Operations helps scale user research by providing tools and processes that empower many PMs to conduct research efficiently while avoiding customer fatigue from repeated inquiries.
29. Product Ops: Standardize Cadences
Product Operations standardizes processes and cadences for strategic check-ins, such as monthly roadmap reviews and quarterly executive planning sessions, defining inputs, outputs, and decision-makers.
30. Product Ops: Standardize Interactions
Product Operations focuses on standardizing inter-divisional interactions (e.g., roadmap formats, relationships with sales/marketing) rather than internal team-specific processes like standups.
31. Hire CPO at Scale-Up
Consider hiring a CPO when your company exceeds $10 million in ARR, especially if you’re managing a portfolio of two or more products or expanding into new markets.
32. CPO for Executive Communication
If executives and the board are unaware of product’s activities or goal achievement, it’s a strong sign to hire a Chief Product Officer to improve communication and strategic alignment.
33. CPO for PM Hiring & Training
If your company struggles to hire product managers or lacks a clear training path for junior PMs, it indicates a need for a Chief Product Officer to provide leadership and growth opportunities.
34. CPO for Multi-Product Growth
Consider hiring a CPO when your company exceeds $10 million in ARR, especially if you’re managing a portfolio of two or more products or expanding into new markets.
35. CPO for Unified Product Leadership
If you need a singular leader to oversee product, design, product operations, and potentially engineering and analytics, consider hiring a Chief Product Officer.
36. CPO: Roadmap to Revenue
A Chief Product Officer must deeply understand the financial implications of the product roadmap, connecting it to revenue projections and collaborating closely with CROs, sales, and CFOs.
37. Embed Consultants for Org Design
For deep organizational transformation and strategy deployment in companies new to product management, consider deeply embedding consultants to design and implement new processes.
38. Interim CPO for Rapid Transition
When a company needs rapid leadership transition, hire an interim CPO for a temporary period (e.g., three months) to stabilize operations, set a basic roadmap, and facilitate the hiring of a permanent CPO.
39. Act on Consultant Advice
If you hire a consultant, be ready to take action and implement their recommendations, as change won’t happen if you don’t listen or act.
40. Embrace Drastic Change
When engaging consultants, be prepared to take decisive action, which may include drastic changes to your organization, strategy, or personnel, to achieve desired outcomes.
41. Strategy: Check Metrics & Effort
A key sign of a missing strategy is when teams are working excessively long hours, but key business metrics remain stagnant, indicating a disconnect between effort and impact.
42. Learn by Execution
The most effective way for product managers to learn and grow is through continuous execution of their daily job, gaining practical experience that informs further learning.
43. Self-Analyze & Deep Dive Skills
Regularly analyze your own job to identify what’s working and not working, then select specific skill gaps (e.g., user research, data analytics) for focused, deep-dive learning.
44. Adapt Processes, Don’t Be Dogmatic
Don’t adhere dogmatically to processes like Scrum; if a process doesn’t serve your team or company, adapt it or change it, as all frameworks are meant to be iterated on and customized.
45. Self-Retrospect Learning Approach
Regularly perform a self-retrospective to assess if your current learning approach is making you a better product manager, and if not, be willing to change your approach.
5 Key Quotes
I've met a lot of organizations that think most of their issues are in the training of their people. And 99% of the time, I see that it's actually in the way that they're setting their goals and deploying their strategy.
Melissa Perri
If your executives and your board are telling you that, the person who's communicating those things to them are usually not chief product officer level, right? Like if you are, if your executives don't know what you're doing, that's a big problem.
Melissa Perri
I just want it to be, I would love to put myself out of business one day because I just want this to work really well.
Melissa Perri
If you have a bunch of people asking you like, why are we building this? Then you didn't do a good job as a leader explaining what, what it is that you're after, right?
Melissa Perri
I think a good aspect of being a leader, whether you're a product manager on a team or even an executive, is making the best informed decision that you possibly can at the time. But then also being willing to correct yourself if you find out it's the wrong one by looking at all the information and then saying, okay, let's try something different.
Melissa Perri
1 Protocols
Creating a Strategy Two-Pager
Melissa Perri- Write about where the company came from and how it is different today.
- Detail external threats to the market and competition, including how the company views them.
- Articulate what the company should care about and what it should not.
- Define what the company is going to do and what it is not going to do.
- Prioritize the strategic intents (big business movers for the next 2-3 years).