"The Product of You": A Talk from Melissa Perri on Product Leadership

In this new talk at Mind the Product, our CEO Melissa Perri describes how you should start investing energy in “the product of you” and plan your career ascent to product leader. This includes not only developing the skills you need as a product leader, but also deciding what type of product leader you want to be:

  1. Startup VP – A startup VP is building a single product line from scratch. They need to excel at taking a problem, finding a solution, and iterating until they find product-market fit. They are also responsible for building up the first product team.

  2. Scaleup CPO – During the growth stage of a company, a Scaleup CPO is responsible for expanding to new products, adding new business lines and looking critically at financial success. This includes M&A, expanding geographically, or moving to platform plays. Increasing revenue and expanding at pace fast pace is the name of the game, with a large amount of board interaction to explain how.

  3. Enterprise CPO – The CPO at the Enterprise phase is less about growth and more about operations and governance, while strategy is pushed down to product lines. As the CPO you bridge the portfolio, reduce costs and align teams through the operational processes you’ve defined. Managing politics is a large part of excelling at this role - it’s about communication and organising a massive scale operation.

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Melissa Perri is the CEO of Produx Labs, a Product Management consultancy in NYC. She is a professor at Harvard Business School, the author of Escaping the Build Trap, and the creator of the online school, Product Institute.

 
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