How to create a winning product strategy | Melissa Perri

**Melissa Perri** (0:00)
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, they have no context on what to work towards. So it's such a holistic approach when you actually go through these transformations or try to set up a product organization. So you either need somebody in there to do it or you got to really be ready to move when somebody comes in to help you.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:31)
Through her speaking, consulting, interim CPO roles and teaching at both Harvard Business School and online, Melissa Perri has seen more product orgs up close than possibly any human alive.
In our chat, we cover the most common problems that product teams face and how to overcome them, when to hire your first PM, how to hone your craft as a PM, signs you're doing a bad job as a PM, also how to structure your product teams and product development process, signs your team doesn't have a strategy and how to come up with one, also how to come up with a product vision, and so much more. I love chatting with Melissa, and I learned a ton, and I can't wait for you to hear this episode.
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Melissa, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me.

**Melissa Perri** (3:03)
Thanks for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:05)
Absolutely. My pleasure. I wanted to set a little context for folks that may not be familiar with you.
How many PMs have you worked with and helped, would you say, over the course of your career?

**Melissa Perri** (3:16)
So between teaching, consulting, and all of those different things, it's probably north of 4,000 at this point. I think we're approaching 5,000 now.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:27)
Oh my god. Okay. And then how many companies would you say you've worked with?

**Melissa Perri** (3:33)
So if we're talking like deep consulting, since I started Products Labs, we've done over 30 companies where we've been in there, did something with them either transformation wise or setting up their PM work or setting their strategy, helping with roadmaps. If we're talking training, we're into the multiple hundreds.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:54)
Insane. Would you say that you're maybe in the top three, maybe top five people in the world that have worked with the most product managers or even have met the most product managers?

**Melissa Perri** (4:04)
I know a lot of people who do what I do. So I think probably among them, probably among them, but I haven't counted everybody else's.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:14)
So for all these reasons, I'm really excited to dig into a lot of the stuff that you've learned along this journey and things that people can take away from your experience. What do you spend your time doing these days? I know there's a lot in your portfolio.

**Melissa Perri** (4:25)
Well, right now, I'll say my primary focus is on training and education in product management. So I'm teaching at Harvard. I teach the second year MBAs in their elective program, Product Management, so they can choose whether or not they want to take that. But that's been really great. And then I have had an online school since 2016 called Product Institute. So it's all a self-serve online education place where we have multiple courses in product management. We have trained almost all of the Fortune 100 companies at this point through that with product management, which is great. But a lot of different growth stage companies coming in there too and smaller companies as well.