Melissa Perri: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. I hope you never need me. That's my goal with everything I do. I'm always like, I would love to put myself out of business one day because I just want this to work really well. But where I am needed is usually when a CEO isn't sure who is the right person to hire. They're usually on the fence. I've come into organizations to help CEOs where they're like, do we need a product person to oversee this? I don't know what a product person does. And I usually talk them through like, hey, what are the challenges you're having? And they tell me everything, and I'm like, okay, these ones are actually caused by you not having that partner to work with. If you had that partner, this is what they could take off your plate and free you up to focus on your vision, and fundraising, and all the other stuff that you have to do as a CEO. So typically, that's where I'd come in to advise. And when I came in in consulting in the past, my motto was always... Well, first I will say I spent a long time doing transformational work, where I would deeply embed and try to push org design, and deploying strategy, and really taking these organizations that didn't understand product management and helping them design how to do it. So I did that for quite a while. And then, when I started working with growth stage companies, my objective was, how do I get in and get out as fast as possible, and bring them in the right leaders? So what I learned, being deeply embedded with these organizations doing this transformation work, was somebody needs to be at the helm of all of this work consistently. And they also have to be able to make the decisions, as well. So you can hire a consultant, but if you don't listen to the consultant, nothing's going to change. And that does happen more often than you think, where everybody just hires and they're like, no, not that way, and you're like, okay, well, it's up to you at the end of the day. I can't change it for you. I've also had people hire me as a consultant and be like, well, no, you change it. And I'm like, I can't. You can't just tell me to do your job. You have to go out there and do it yourself. But I will give you all the informed choices and try to design it to meet your needs. And sometimes it's not coming out super ideal and perfect, but it's all a transition. We make roadmaps for transformations. But, being deeply embedded like this, I was starting to think, how do I make sure that this lasts? And that's where I believe strong product leadership comes in. Whether you train somebody up in the organization to take that role over and keep driving it forward, or you hire in somebody who knows what they're doing. So when I started working with Insight, our premise was, we will never touch a company, or be in a company hands-on, for more than three months. , or you hire in somebody who knows what they're doing. So when I started working with Insight, our premise was, we will never touch a company, or be in a company hands-on, for more than three months. The idea was, within that three months, we hire in a chief product Officer to take the helm, and we do just enough to keep it on track, playing an interim CPO role, to make sure that they can keep delivering, they can keep growing. We'd have just enough of a roadmap to keep the teams moving. We train them a little bit, we'd help implement some processes. We'd help get all the information a CPO would need so that when they walked into that organization, they could read the background on their customers, understand what the strategy is so far, look at the current roadmap, watch some customer interviews, know who to talk to, get the lay of the land and have some people working on stuff. And then they could take the time they need to actually build a strategy that's going to help grow the company. So really, at the end of the day, when you need some help, you realize something is not working but you're not sure how to make it right. And then, you can either hire in a leader... Sometimes the question is what kind of leader. That's when you try to hire consulting, get some outside expertise on that. Or, if you want to hire an interim CPO type person, you have to understand that's very temporary, unless you're trying to convert that person into a full-time, which is totally fine if you want to do that and have those expectations going in. But consultants can only help as well when you're willing to take action. So I tell some companies as well at the beginning, you're not ready for this unless you are ready to take action. And sometimes that's drastic change. Sometimes that's changing up people. Sometimes you look at your organization and say, this isn't the organization that's going to get me to the next level, so we're going to have to make some changes, we're going to have to hire in some more senior people as well who can help train the masses of other people that need training. We're going to have to make some hard decisions, and you have to reevaluate your strategy a lot of the times, and figure out how to set course with that too. 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've got to really be ready to move when somebody comes in to help you. I was going to save these questions for later, but it's as good a time as any to get into them around strategy, which your book is about, I would say, is the fact that people just build features, features, features, and don't really have a strategy or aren't using a strategy. And so, just spending a little time there, what are signs that your team or your company either doesn't have a strategy or aren't using their strategy?…

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