Melissa Perri is the renowned author of "Escaping the Build Trap" and a well-known product consultant and educator. She has worked for a long time with Denise Tilles, another seasoned product leader, with whom she has been evangelising Product Operations to help scale product companies effectively. They recently collaborated on a book, coincidentally called "Product Operations", and we spoke all about the story behind the book and the themes within it.
The relationship between product management and sales teams is traditionally tricky, and a common complaint from B2B PMs. Saeed Khan and I are looking to help with this with an online course and we'd love your feedback on your relationship with sales. This will help shape the course and, if you want to take part when the course is ready, we'll give you a special discount.
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1. Product Operations is about helping product managers make faster, better-quality decisions
It's important to dispel the myth of multi-armed product managers who can just do everything. There's too much for everyone to do! This creates barriers to doing great product management work and pulls product managers away from doing the real, value-add product management work that they're judged on.
2. There are three pillars of product operations...The three pillars are ways to think about how to organise enablement. They are "Business & Data Insights", "Customer & Market Insights" and "Process and Practices". They are all the foundation of good product decision-making, and all companies will have a certain level of maturity already.
3. ... But you don't need to build all the pillars all at onceYou don't need to fix everything at once. If you already have good capabilities in one or more areas, fix the ones that you don't have good capabilities in! You don't need to boil the ocean, just find the biggest gaps and opportunities to improve, and start to work on them.
4. Process shouldn't be seen as a dirty wordThere's such a thing as too much process but, even if you don't call it process or try to define it, all work involves a process. It's important to have people to oversee the process at scale, prevent duplication or rework, and make sure that process is right-sized rather than ever-expanding.
5. The first step is being honest about your current stateThere are plenty of ways to go with product operations as you scale, but the most important thing is being really honest with yourself about what your most important limiting factors are, what your product managers are spending time on and what's going to work for you.
Check out "Product Operations""Many companies want to reap the benefits of economies of scale that comes with being a product-led company. As our businesses change shape to focus more on software, so do our ways of working. We need to make sure we’re breaking down these silos of information and capabilities that arise at scale. To react quickly and set great Product Strategies, leaders and team members alike need access to high-quality data and a process to implement their decisions."
Check it out on Amazon or the book website.
Check out "Escaping the Build Trap""To stay competitive in today’s market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. "
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact Melissa & DeniseYou can catch up with Melissa at melissaperri.com, check out https://productinstitute.com or follow her on LinkedIn.
You can catch up with Denise at denisetilles.com or follow her on LinkedIn.
Supporting the Next Generation of Female Product Managers with Women in Product UK (with Namrata Sarmah, Founder @ Women in Product UK & CPO @ INTO)
Paying Off Your Organisation’s Human Debt Through Agility & Psychological Safety (with Duena Blomstrom, Founder & CEO @ People Not Tech)
Moving Beyond Founder-Led Product Development & Setting PMs up for Success (with Jennifer Yang-Wong, VP of Product @ Contrary)
Connecting Product Management to Business Goals by Mastering your Product Strategy (with Gabrielle Bufrem, Product Leadership Coach & Advisor)
Taking Control of your Career with Life-Changing Conversations (with Julie Starr, Author ”The Coaching Manual”, ”The Mentoring Manual” & ”Brilliant Coaching”)
Designing Conversations that Matter with the Conversation OS Canvas (with Daniel Stillman, Executive Coach & Conversation Designer @ The Conversation Factory)
Product Managing APIs - What’s Different and What’s the Same? (with Deepa Goyal, Product Strategy Lead @ Postman & Author of ”API Analytics for Product Managers”)
Build Better Products Faster by Embracing Continuous Delivery (with Dave Farley, Consultant & Co-author of ”Continuous Delivery”)
The Big Pivot to Reinvent Product Management (with Yana Welinder, Founder & CEO @ Kraftful)
Landing That Perfect Role by Finding Your Inevitable Edge (with Erika Klics, Job Search Strategist & Founder @ ErikaKlics.com)
Doing the Splits to Accelerate your Product Growth (with Andres Glusman, CEO @ DoWhatWorks & A/B Test Enthusiast)
Moving to Customer-Led Growth by Forgetting the Funnel (with Georgiana Laudi & Claire Suellentrop, Founders @ Forget the Funnel)
Embracing Change to Innovate in Product Management (with Greg Coticchia, CEO @ Sopheon)
Achieving Product Excellence with the Product Operations Manifesto (with Antonia Landi, Product Ops Consultant & Co-Author ”Product Operations Manifesto”)
Is Product-Led Growth Really For You? (with Leah Tharin, Product-Led Growth Guru & Head of Product @ Jua)
(Don’t) Scream If You Want To Go Faster - How to Accelerate Product Development (with Ed Biden, Founder @ Hustle Badger)
The Rise of the Robots - How to Responsibly use AI in your Products (with ChatGPT 4, Cutting-edge language model @ OpenAI)
Moving from Value Streams to Software Profit Streams (with Luke Hohmann, Co-author ”Software Profit Streams” & former SAFe® Framework Contributor)
Getting Ahead of the Competition by Getting Good at Competitor Analysis (with Bethan Vincent, Managing Partner @ Open Velocity)
The Seven Deadly Mistakes of Productization (with Eisha Armstrong, Co-founder @ Vecteris & Author ”Productize”)
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