Table of Contents
When organizations struggle with product development, the instinct is often to blame the individual skills of the product managers. Leadership might assume the team needs more training, better agile certifications, or sharper technical skills. However, according to Melissa Perri, a veteran product leader who has trained over 5,000 product managers and consulted with dozens of organizations, 99% of the time the issue isn't personnel—it is context.
Perri argues that most dysfunction stems from how companies set goals and deploy strategy. Even the most talented product managers cannot succeed if they lack context on what they are working toward. Without a cohesive strategy connecting daily execution to high-level business goals, teams spin their wheels, shipping features that fail to move the needle. Creating a winning product strategy requires moving beyond feature factories to build a structure where every team member understands how their work impacts the bottom line.
Key Takeaways
- The "Missing Middle" is the root of misalignment: A strategic gap often exists between high-level company vision and the tactical work of product teams, leaving executives unsure of what tech is doing and teams unsure of why they are building specific features.
- Training cannot fix a strategy problem: Investing in PM skill development is futile if the organization lacks clear goals, prioritizing frameworks, and a coherent vision.
- Know when to hire a CPO: A Chief Product Officer becomes essential when a company moves from a single product to a complex portfolio, typically around the $20–30 million ARR mark or during significant geographical expansion.
- Product Operations is essential for scale: As teams grow, Product Ops provides the necessary infrastructure regarding internal data, customer insights, and standardized governance to keep the organization moving effectively.
- Strategy requires data, not just intuition: Effective leadership demands digging into financials and market data, rather than relying solely on gut feelings or dogmatic agile processes.
Diagnosing the Core Issue: The "Missing Middle"
One of the most pervasive issues in modern tech companies is a phenomenon Perri describes as the "Missing Middle." This is a disconnect where executives have high-level goals (e.g., "increase revenue by 20%") and development teams have low-level tasks (e.g., "add a button to the checkout page"), but there is no connective tissue linking the two.
In these environments, teams often work incredibly hard with little to show for it.
"Signs that there are no strategy: Teams are all working like dogs... they're working 80 hours a week... releasing, releasing, releasing... and none of the metrics are moving."
When strategy is absent or poorly communicated, product becomes a "black box" to the executive team. The C-suite sees headcount growth and activity but cannot correlate it with business value. Conversely, product managers feel like short-order cooks, taking requests from stakeholders without the authority or context to push back or prioritize effectively.
The Strategy Stack
To bridge this gap, organizations must implement a structured hierarchy of goals—a strategy stack. This typically flows from:
- Company Vision: A concrete, 5-10 year view of how the company serves customers and differs from competitors.
- Strategic Intents: The 2-3 big business movers for the next few years (e.g., expanding up-market, entering a new geography).
- Product Initiatives: Large-scale problems the product team will solve to achieve the strategic intents.
- Options/Epics: The tactical solutions and experiments teams execute.
If you can walk up to any individual contributor on a product team and ask, "What are you working on, and why does it matter to the business?" and they can trace their work all the way up this stack, you have a deployed strategy.
Scaling Leadership: When to Hire a CPO
As companies grow, the nature of product leadership must evolve. In the early stages—finding product-market fit—the focus is entirely on execution and rapid experimentation. However, as an organization scales into the growth stage, the challenge shifts from "building the thing" to "managing the portfolio."
The Distinction Between Head of Product and CPO
Many companies confuse the role of a VP/Head of Product with that of a Chief Product Officer. While a VP of Product is a functional leader focused on execution, team management, and process, a CPO is a true business executive.
Perri notes that a CPO must be "joined at the hip" with the CFO and CRO. They need to understand financials deeply enough to create revenue projections based on roadmaps and navigate complex board dynamics. If your product leader cannot confidently explain to the board how technical investments will yield future revenue, you likely have a gap at the C-suite level.
Triggers for Hiring a CPO
While headcount is a factor (often around 7-8 PMs), the complexity of the business is a stronger indicator of the need for a CPO. Key triggers include:
- Revenue Milestones: Crossing the $20–30 million ARR threshold.
- Portfolio Complexity: Moving from a single product to a multi-product or platform ecosystem.
- Market Expansion: Entering drastically new markets or geographies.
- M&A Activity: Merging product cultures and technology stacks.
The Role of Product Operations
As product organizations scale, chaos often ensues. Different teams use different roadmapping formats, customer research is siloed or duplicative, and data is inaccessible. This is where Product Operations (Product Ops) becomes critical. It is not about adding bureaucracy; it is about enabling scale.
Perri categorizes Product Ops into three main pillars:
1. Internal Data and Insights
Product Ops helps surface internal data—financials, usage analytics, retention metrics—in a way that is consumable for strategy. Instead of every PM struggling to pull SQL queries, Product Ops ensures the team has a clear view of the data needed to make decisions.
2. Customer Research and Market Insights
In large organizations, uncoordinated research can lead to "customer collision," where the same high-value clients are interviewed repeatedly by different teams asking the same questions. Product Ops streamlines recruitment, standardizes the storage of insights, and ensures that research is accessible across the organization.
3. Process and Governance
This pillar focuses on standardizing the interfaces between product and the rest of the company.
"I don't care how a team does their stand-ups... but I do care what format your roadmap comes in. I do care how we make sure that we have a good working relationship with sales."
By standardizing how roadmaps are presented and how progress is reported, leadership can compare "apples to apples" across the portfolio, facilitating better resource allocation and strategic planning.
Crafting a Concrete Product Vision
A strategy cannot exist without a clear vision, yet many companies rely on fluffy slogans like "We want to be the Uber of X" or "We want to be the backbone of healthcare." These are insufficient because they do not guide decision-making.
A strong product vision must be concrete enough that people can visualize the end state. It needs to articulate:
- Differentiation: How is the value proposition strictly better and different from competitors?
- Customer Definition: Who are we serving in the future (which may differ from who we serve today)?
- Anti-Patterns: Explicitly stating what the company will not do or become.
Perri advises leaders to use the "Two-Pager" format. Rather than writing 20-page requirements documents, leaders should write a two-page narrative explaining where the company came from, the external threats, the current positioning, and the strategic path forward. When combined with design prototypes to visualize the future state, this becomes a powerful tool for alignment.
Advancing Your Career as a Product Manager
For individual product managers looking to level up, the path involves more than just consuming content; it requires a shift in mindset and behavior.
Adopt an Executive Mindset
To improve strategic thinking, PMs should mentally role-play as the CPO. Even if you don't have the authority, ask yourself: "If I were in charge of the entire portfolio, would I approve this feature? How does my work impact the wider business?"
Look Outside the Building
Product managers often get stuck inside the R&D bubble. Perri recommends actively building relationships with Sales, Finance, and Support. Understanding why sales deals are lost or how the financial model works provides the context necessary to transition from a tactical executioner to a strategic business leader.
Prioritize Execution Over Theory
While books and courses are valuable, the best learning comes from doing. Perri warns against becoming dogmatic about frameworks—particularly Agile. Processes like Scrum are means to an end, not the goal itself. If a process isn't serving the team or the strategy, it should be changed. The most successful PMs build a personal toolbox of methodologies and adapt them to the specific context of their company.
Conclusion
Creating a winning product strategy is not about following a rigid template or hiring more people—it is about rigorous alignment. It requires leaders to clearly articulate a vision, define the strategic intents, and build the operational scaffolding to let teams execute autonomously. Whether you are a CEO realizing it is time for a CPO, or a PM trying to understand the "why" behind your backlog, success lies in closing the gap between the high-level business goals and the code being shipped every day.
