Melissa Perri: belief

Transcript context

…What do you suggest companies do up until that point? I know titles are not necessarily consistent. I imagine usually there's a head of product before that point. Is that what you'd recommend? What should you do up until you get to a point where it's time for a CPO? Head of product or VP of product, I think, are very interchangeable, in my head. What a VP of product or a head of product is, is a functional leader around product management. Sometimes you have design reporting into them, sometimes not. But they're very good at implementing processes so that product works smoothly. They can pull together the roadmap across all other product managers. They can usually train lower level people. Where the gaps come between that and becoming an executive is interfacing with the board, understanding the financials super deeply so that you can create revenue projections off of what your roadmaps and your product's strategy is going to be. So chief product officers have to deeply understand how to get from roadmap to revenue and how to analyze those things and put it into perspective. So they're usually joined at the hip with the chief revenue officer, or the head of sales, the CFO. They can confidently project to the board. They're a fantastic executive navigator when it comes to dealing with other executives and bringing those things together. And they can oversee a lot more functions than just product, usually. Everything can kind of... They're a senior enough person where you can have a couple different functional lines report into them with a head of design, head of product reporting up. So VPs of product are usually fantastic at growing one or two products. But then, when you get into multiproduct strategies, or very complex platform strategies, and the scope starts to really creep, that's where I would start to bring in a CPO. I was going to ask you about what to look for in a CPO, and you answered it. So, amazing. Real quick, before you move on to the scale of product management and some thoughts there, when would it make sense for a company to consider bringing in someone like you to do either interim CPO role or just to help out?…

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