"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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Listen to the first round of “Dear Melissa” answers here, and hear some exciting news!
Back in October, we asked our community if they had any product questions for Melissa, and we received an overwhelming amount of thoughtful, complex questions. So, drumroll please…
How can you stand out in a larger pool of candidates, now that geography is no longer a factor? How can you make a strong impression when interviewing from your living room? When you do land a job, what is it like to be onboarded entirely via Zoom? And how can you be a productive PM on your new, fully distributed team?
For me, it always felt like there was never enough time in the day to focus beyond work, family, friends, etc. before the pandemic. Any window of potential free time was filled with commuting, face to face lunches, IRL standups and sprint planning. But now, many product managers are finding a silver lining in the days of Covid- there’s actually MORE opportunity to pursue professional development.
When news of the novel coronavirus started spreading as fast as well a virus, many businesses were not prepared to run with distributed or remote teams. But they didn’t have a choice. Though many successful companies are full distributed (Invision) and most big companies have offices around the globe, this shift was sudden and shocking. Some organizations stepped up to these challenges and others had a few blunders but figured it out in the end.
Are you part of a company that has grown through mergers or acquisitions? Does your company have a portfolio of products they’ve built? If there is a horizontal strategy at play, then the executive leadership probably has intentions of integrating the different products to create a competitive advantage with a “best in suite” angle.
How can a new CPO approach building solid relationships within the leadership team? How can you gain your board’s trust? What does a strong CEO/CPO partnership look like?
Brian Bhuta, CPO at Signify Health, has a knack for getting the toughest critics on his side. We’ve watched firsthand as he’s joined organizations and come up against tons of intense resistance. Then, within a month, not only has he accomplished what he needed to get done, but he’s made friends along the way. He uses this superpower to transform teams into product management machines.
As a leader in product, you have likely come across situations in which your hunches or intuition weren’t enough to guide your team or company forward. Whether its due to pushback from other stakeholders, increasing competitive pressures, or a changing technology landscape - high growth tech companies require us to constantly be collecting data and insights around our product, our market, and problem-solution fit.
Remote onboarding completely changes your first month experience. You have no natural way to meet coworkers. There are no first week outings or get-to-know-you coffee chats. Most of your video call interactions are with your direct superior. While all of this makes it particularly nerve-wracking to start a new job virtually, I promise there are also wonderful aspects about your situation.
We’re tapping into our CPO Expert Network from our new CPO Accelerator Program and learning from the best product leaders out there. Abbie Moore, CPO of non-profit organization Adopt-A-Pet, tells us what her company values most, how she measures impact, and why testing ideas and building products is just as important in the non-profit world.