Author of Escaping the Build Trap, founder of Produx Labs and Product Institute.
This is what separates teams that accelerate with AI from those that get stuck. You don't find perfect data lying around. You create it using the deep product intuition you already have. /end Check out the whole episode with @vlaurenlee here:
They're taking everything they know about commerce, customer behavior, and product strategy, and using that knowledge to systematically generate the training data they need. It transforms the data bottleneck from a passive waiting game into an active engineering challenge. /3
This week on the podcast, @vlaurenlee from @Shopify shared how her team is using AI to solve AI problems, instead of waiting years for interaction data. "You're basically imparting all of your product intuition into an LLM to then shape yet another LLM." /2
Most teams make the mistake of waiting for data to magically appear before building their AI product. They get stuck in the classic chicken-and-egg problem: you need data to build good AI, but you need users to generate that data. So they wait. And wait. And wait some more. /1
Product teams need to think like investors—understand the real cost, focus on ROI, and balance risk to drive outcomes. Fabrice des Mazery, former CPO at TheFork, shares how shifting to an investment mindset leads to smarter decisions and impact. Listen:
Scaling product teams is hard. Delivering consistent outcomes while keeping things simple is even harder. Mark Rosenberg, VP of Product at @Workday shares how revamping ProdOps reduced complexity, aligned teams, and delivered better outcomes at scale. 🎧
Compliance can become an opportunity for innovation. This week on Product Thinking, @tomerlondon, CPO at @GustoHQ, shares how embedding lawyers in product teams ensures compliance is part of the process. 🎙️Listen now:
“Listen to the first round of “Dear Melissa” answers here, and hear some exciting news! Back in October, we asked our community if they had any product questions for Melissa, and we received an overwhelming amount of thoughtful, complex questions. So, drumroll please…”
Melissa Perri interviews two product leaders, Alicia Hurst (Group PM at JW Player, hiring for an NYC team) and Vibhor Chhabra (VP of Product at TaxJar, a company that has always been fully remote), about hiring…
The article argues that remote work during the pandemic has, paradoxically, created room for product managers and leaders to invest in professional development. Without commutes and in-person meetings eating their days…
Melissa Perri argues that the sudden shift to distributed work during COVID left many teams disconnected, and that the core problem is missing the informal stories and interactions that build trust and candor. She…
Melissa Perri argues that when several product teams must deliver a shared cross-team integration, companies need a deliberate coordination model or the work stalls. She describes two strategies: dual responsibility…
Melissa Perri argues that a new Chief Product Officer must shift from viewing executives as obstacles to seeing them as teammates with their own goals and constraints. The essay stresses that the CEO relationship is the…
Melissa Perri interviews Brian Bhuta, CPO at Signify Health, about how product leaders gain trust and influence, especially when joining a team full of resistance. Bhuta argues that influence is an advanced form of…
Cheryl Michael, CPO of CentralReach, argues that product leaders who want to act with confidence need a structured, data-driven approach to product operations rather than relying on intuition alone. She frames product…
The author, who onboarded fully remotely at Produx Labs during the COVID-19 pandemic, argues that starting a job virtually is daunting but has real upsides. Remote hiring signals the company values the role, offers…
In this interview from Melissa Perri's CPO Accelerator series, Abbie Moore, CPO of the non-profit Adopt-A-Pet, explains that product leadership at a non-profit shares most fundamentals with for-profit work: customer…
The article argues that Chief Product Officer roles have multiplied since 2020 as companies become more customer-centric, but the title is inconsistently applied and poorly defined. It distinguishes the CPO, who sets…
This interview with Siamak Khorrami, Product Operations and Governance Lead at ATB Financial, a government-owned Canadian bank, describes how the bank built a product management capability during a multi-year digital…
Melissa Perri argues that product leaders should deliberately invest in "the product of you" and plan their career path toward product leadership. Beyond building core skills, aspiring leaders need to decide what kind…
Melissa Perri describes how a typical remote staff meeting can waste the chance to connect and align a team, and argues that remote work mainly amplifies existing meeting problems. She interviews product leaders at…
Melissa Perri argues that product leaders planning a company's next phase should survey a standard set of growth strategies rather than fixate on a single path. She organizes 16 options around three business objectives…
Melissa Perri shares advice gathered from experienced operators on what product leaders should prioritize during the COVID-19 crisis. Her core argument is that survival comes first: preserve cash, shift the roadmap…
Melissa Perri recounts how her consulting work began by sneaking product management into companies under buzzwords like agile and digital, since 'product management' itself got doors shut. Executives' stated reason for…
Product teams often face a flood of feature requests from support and sales, and it is hard to tell which ones deserve engineering time. Perri argues that a single question, asking how much revenue a request will…
Melissa Perri and Kevin Broom argue that SaaS companies chasing net retention above 100% through land-and-expand can clash with customers who believe their subscription already covers new features. Using fast food menus…
Melissa Perri argues that a product roadmap is a communication tool, not just a planning artifact, so it deserves deliberate design for each audience. She covers practical choices: consistent color coding, quarterly…