Melissa Perri is the product manager’s product manager – she’s able to do the job, explain it, and teach you how to do it better.  So when we got her on the line, we covered everything… including Japanese deployment strategies, Marmite and peanut butter, product leadership and team organisation, how companies scale, how to pick the right environment for you, and even her new book, Escaping the Build Trap.

Quotes of the Episode

I see a lot of product managers from an enterprise company go, ‘Hey, I’m gonna work at a startup, it’s gonna be awesome’. And then they get in there and they go ‘Holy crap, what happened? This place is a mess. There’s no structure, there’s nobody to do all these things.’

Great product leaders are in with the leadership team – they’re peers, they are very close to them, they’re a team.  They also shelter their team from all the swirl at the executive level…

Listen if you’d like to learn more about

* Escaping the build trap – how to focus on the right thing

* Moving up the ladder to the CPO role

* Why SAFe doesn’t work

* Why good product people fail (sometimes)

Links mentioned in this episode

* Follow Melissa on Twitter, check out her work with PRODUX Labs, or get trained at the Product Institute, and catch up on her Product Kata

* Read Melissa’s book, Escaping the Build Trap –  US / UK / DE

* Read The Art of Action –  US / UK / DE

* Insight Venture Partners

* Stratechery

* Curious what SAFe is?

 

Hosts

The Product Experience is hosted by Lily Smith and Randy Silver.

Lily enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. Lily has spent 13 years in the tech industry working mainly with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She has worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank in Bristol, the Product Managers’ meetup with regular events and talks on Product now with 800+ members and growing. This year Lily will be launching ProductCamp in Bristol and she joins the MTP team as co-host of The Product Experience podcast.

A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy has been working as an interactive producer and product manager across the US and UK for nearly 20 years. After launching Amazon’s music stores in the US and UK, Randy has worked with museums and arts groups, online education, media & entertainment, retail and financial services. He’s held Head of Product roles at HSBC and Sainsbury’s, where he also directed their 100+-person product community. He’s spoken at Mind the Product Engage (Hamburg and Manchester), at a number of ProductTanks (London, Zurich, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Oxford,  and Brighton… so far!) and at conferences across the US and Europe.

Music

Our theme music is from Hamburg-based Pau, featuring ProductTank Hamburg’s own Arne Kittler on bass.