How to create a winning product strategy

Melissa Perri, author of Escaping the Build Trap and Product Operations and founder of The Product Institute, discusses how product owner roles emerged from Scrum and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and why they often fall short of real product management. The conversation covers the history of agile, the pitfalls of rigid frameworks, and practical advice for companies and product owners who want to become effective product managers.

01Key learnings

• The product owner role came from Scrum as a way to help developers prioritize work, not from product management, so it often lacks discovery, strategy, and customer research.
• Frameworks like SAFe are heavily marketed and often adopted rigidly; Perri has seen most teams that found success end up ripping out the framework and adapting it.
• Teams that already talk to customers and iterate quickly may not need a framework at all; the principle of shipping value and learning fast matters more than process.
• Companies transforming should build a product operating model covering strategy, org design, product operations, culture, incentives, and clear career paths for product roles.
• Product owners can grow by asking what outcomes a feature should achieve, joining customer research, and reframing their work around measurable value rather than backlog throughput.
• Resumes should describe customer problems solved and metrics moved, not agile cadences or process tasks; certifications like CSPO rarely substitute for real product experience.
• Leaders should bring in experienced product people and standardize titles, since mixing product owner and product manager titles creates confusion and inconsistent expectations.
• Process is not the enemy, but processes should be inspected and changed when they stop serving customers, as the Dutch water company example showed.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.