Melissa Perri > Quotes

“When companies do not understand their customers’ or users’ problems well, they cannot possibly define value for them. Instead of doing the work to learn this information about customers, they create a proxy that is easy to measure. “Value” becomes the quantity of features that are delivered, and, as a result, the number of features shipped becomes the primary metric of success.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Strategy is a deployable decision-making framework, enabling action to achieve desired outcomes, constrained by current capabilities, coherently aligned to the existing context.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Kill the bad ideas before they take up too much time and energy from the teams and before you get hooked on them. Instead, fall in love with the problem you are solving.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“The build trap is when organizations become stuck measuring their success by outputs rather than outcomes. It’s when they focus more on shipping and developing features rather than on the actual value those things produce.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Problem-based user research is generative research, meaning that its purpose is to find the problem you want to solve.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Companies often confuse the building to learn and building to earn.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Then I went to my peers in the leadership team and asked them what was the most important thing we could do as a company,” continued Jen. “They all gave me different answers. It’s pretty clear we’re not aligned on what our strategy is or what we want to become as a company.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Start listening to your team. Involve them. Listen to your customers and focus on their problems instead of your own solutions. Fall in love with those problems. Also, go seek out data to prove and validate your ideas. Turn to concrete evidence, rather than opinions.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“You can learn more about HEART metrics in Rodden’s article, “How to Choose the Right UX Metrics for Your Product.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Esto necesita cambiar por completo la mentalidad de la empresa, de hacer entregas a conseguir resultados.”
― Melissa Perri, Escapa de la Trampa del Desarrollo: Cómo crear valor real con una gestión efectiva del producto

“Good strategy isn’t a detailed plan. It’s a framework that helps you make decisions.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Consulting also taught me that one of the quickest ways to kill the spirit of a great employee is to put them in an environment where they can’t succeed. That’s when most people leave.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“it’s not the customer’s job to solve their own problems. It’s your job to ask them the right questions.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“After we have set the goal, we begin walking through the Product Kata. We ask ourselves the following: What is the goal? Where are we now in relation to that goal? What is the biggest problem or obstacle standing in the way of me reaching that goal? How do I try to solve that problem? What do I expect to happen (hypothesis)? What actually happened, and what did we learn?”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Here are a few examples of compelling vision statements: To offer designer eyewear at a revolutionary price, while leading the way for socially conscious businesses. Warby Parker At Bank of America, we are guided by a common purpose to help make financial lives better by connecting clients and communities to the resources they need to be successful. Bank of America Becoming the best global entertainment distribution service, licensing entertainment content around the world, creating markets that are accessible to film makers, and helping content creators around the world to find a global audience. Netflix”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Marquetly realized that, in order to grow its revenue to the numbers it needed, it should focus on expanding upmarket, selling to larger companies (enterprises),”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Don’t spend your time overdesigning and creating unique, innovative solutions for things that are not core to your value proposition.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“What was the last product you decided to kill?”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“we need to break the success metrics into something we can measure on a shorter time scale. We call this the team goal, and it’s how we measure the success of the option.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Giff Constable wrote an entire book, called Talking to Humans, that can walk you through how to do just that.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Every industry and product has unknowns — getting creative about how you answer these unknowns is key.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Stephen Bungay, one of the most respected leaders in strategy deployment and creation”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Strategies are interconnecting stories told throughout the organization that explain the objective and outcomes, tailored to a specific time frame. We call this act of communicating and aligning those narratives strategy deployment.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Who came up with the last feature or product idea you built?”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“The point of this team is not to dictate how the members of a team work together to build the product but, instead, to create the criteria for inputs and outputs of the work. For example, they are not creating the product roadmap for the teams. They are creating a system and template for teams to input their goals, themes, progress, and details that can then be shared around the organization. They are not dictating whether a team can talk to users. They are creating systems that help teams figure out which users to target for their experimentation.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“HEART metrics measure happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success. These are usually used to talk about a specific product or feature.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“tool called Qualaroo?” asked Rich, the lead developer. “It allows us to poll people when they go toward the back button or try to leave the page.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Acquire more individual users. Retain existing individual users better. Create new revenue streams for existing individual users.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“If you do not already have a strategy in place, I want to stress that this is not a one-day or one-week process. I have seen companies try to cram the creation of a strategy into that time frame and fail. This is something that takes time and focus to craft and maintain.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“The biggest thing I’ve learned in product management is to always focus on the problem. If you anchor yourself with the why, you will be more likely to build the right thing,”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value