Melissa Perri
Melissa Perri is the founder of Product Institute, author of Escaping the Build Trap, and host of the Product Thinking Podcast. She has worked with startups, Fortune 50 companies, and everything in between to help them build better products and level up their product teams.
Career (separate track) Skills
Advancing from a product owner to a product manager role requires shifting your focus from backlog execution to strategic discovery and customer validation.
"This product owner role did not emerge from product management as we know it today. It was a way to help the developers prioritize what to work on."
To create an outcome-focused product resume, you must demonstrate your ability to drive value through research and validation rather than just managing a delivery queue.
"I started to learn that there was this product owner role in Scrum where I was talking more about how we traditionally talk about product management, understand your customer, go out test things, make..."
Team & Organization Skills
Rigid scaling frameworks often fail to deliver long-term value because they prioritize adherence to process over the fundamental goal of delivering customer value.
"I do not recommend using SAFe. Every single person I have talked to who likes SAFe, found success with SAFe, they ended up ripping it up and making it into something else."