Melissa Perri
Founder & CEO, Product Institute. On 1 show, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveauthoracademichost@lissijean ↗LinkedIn ↗melissaperri.com ↗
Melissa Perri is a product management expert and executive advisor who trains product leaders and helps enterprises design modern product operating models. She is the author of Escaping the Build Trap and previously taught product management at Harvard Business School.
1shows
3appearances
43statements
5resolved
3supported
2contradicted
60%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Melissa Perri said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Perri: SAFe fails because it ignores product discovery and value connection
“And that's what I think SAFE was trying to do, but it's not working because it's not solving the problems of the product management, and it's not solving that problem of connecting the value Back to the product teams. Instead, it's seen as a role that almost l…”
Perri: Product owner certifications omit essential skills like research and data
“When people get trained to be a product owner, it's usually a two-day class where they teach them, hey, this is how you break down a backlog. This is how you do stand-ups with your teams. This is how you think about prioritizing work. This is how you manage yo…”
Perri: SAFe turns product owners into tactical order takers
“What I've seen that doesn't work here is that you are basically making these product owners order takers. They are extremely tactical.”
Perri: A Dutch water company went bankrupt adopting SAFe
“There's actually a great story about a water company in the Netherlands, right? And they decided to adopt safe. And this is, this was on the news like a couple months ago. They decided to adopt safe in their IT teams and start working with it. And they're they…”
Perri: All product owners should fundamentally be product managers
“Take Scrum away. You still need product management, right? Like product owner doesn't exist without Scrum. That's not a thing, but you still need product managers. And that's why all product owners should be product managers. They should be fundamentally produ…”
Perri: McKinsey consultants selling agile transformations lack internal operational experience
“A lot of the people at McKinsey haven't done this before, right? They've never been inside the organization trying to transform it and stay there for a long time. And that's why I'd be really skeptical of who's selling that.”
Perri: PMs should never outsource product decision-making to product ops
“You should never be like outsourcing your decision making to a product ops person. That's not the point. Like they're the product manager for the product managers. That's how I think about it, right? So their decisions should be around how do I operationalize …”
Perri: 99% of product issues stem from strategy deployment, not training
“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. Because once you train those people. The…”
Perri: Executives buy SAFe because it is the only plug-and-play framework
“Executives buy SAFE because it is the only framework out there that basically draws them a map and says, plug and play, do this. And that's why everybody's so excited about it because it's the only thing that specifies things to this level.”
Perri: Enterprise adoption of SAFe is not slowing down
“I have not seen SAFE slowing down by any means out there for people adopting it. I see more and more organizations adopting it.”
Perri: Middle-manager-led transformations fail because their jobs are at risk
“I've seen it run by a lot of middle managers, like a transformation run by tons of middle managers. And those are the jobs that are usually in most jeopardy when you start transforming and you have to reskill and you have to figure out what to do. And they don…”
Perri: Everyone successful with SAFe ripped it up and altered it
“Every single person I have talked to Who like safe found success with safe. They ended up ripping it up and making it into something else. So I'm like, it's not actually safe by the book.”
Perri: Organizations should eliminate separate product owner and PM titles
“Get rid of these two different titles because it's confusing everybody. I've seen companies... I've seen companies with 47 different titles for product managers.”
Perri: McKinsey created a division to introduce SAFe to enterprises
“McKinsey made a huge division to do this. And a lot of safe was actually introduced to organizations from McKinsey and from large organizations. Consulting organizations like that.”
Perri: Jira does not work for enterprise-wide product roadmaps
“And, like, JIRA does not work for that, right? You need a portfolio tool to be able to roll that up Into something that makes sense.”
Perri: Agile coaches without product management experience struggle in product ops
“And agile coaches who have never been a product manager before in a well-run company are going to struggle there because they're going to revert back to agile processes and optimizing for things like scrum, but they're not going to do what that role is designe…”
Perri: Hire consultants instead of database engineers for data product ops
“What I wouldn't hire for that role as a first person is like a data.
It's not a database engineer, right?
Like that's not what we're doing.
We're not like
Sequel-ing, like turning things into the right SQL tables.
Like we're instead trying to get the info…”
Perri: High-growth CPOs should make product ops their first hire
“And we say to a lot of CPOs, especially like high growth companies, like make your first hire just a product ops person to help you get this data out and start looking at it because that helps them with board meetings. It helps them set strategy.”
Perri: Product operations should decentralize user research rather than siloing it
“It's not. Centralizing user research as a practice. It's helping to scale user research so that we can enable more people to do user research, especially when you get into some of these companies.”
Perri: Product teams should abandon dogmatic Agile and Scrum when unhelpful
“Try to tell teams that, you know, started with scrum or started with some of these more dogmatic processes. It doesn't serve you. Move on, change it, right? Everything's meant to be iterated on. Everything's meant to be adapted. If it does not work for you do …”
Perri: Capital One Succeeded by Adding Product Management to Agile
“Capital One is a great example that took their agile transformation and started adding product management on it. And they really turned that around in the card business.”
Perri: No product managers wrote the original Agile Manifesto
“Nobody was a product manager who went to that meeting, right? Nobody who wrote the Agile Manifesto was actually a product manager.”
Perri: Capital One eliminated all Agile and Scrum roles
“Capital One just came out and said they got rid of all their Agile roles, all their Scrum roles. They were an early adopter of safe. They don't do it anymore.”
The other half of the tape: Melissa Perri's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Melissa's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Product Institute | 3 | 43 | 60% 3/5 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |