Melissa Perri on Strategy Deployment, the Missing Middle, and When to Hire a CPO
Melissa Perri (founder of Product Institute, author of Escaping the Build Trap) and Lenny Rachitsky on the most common failure mode at product-led companies — not weak strategy at the top, but weak translation between executive intent and team-level execution — and how to diagnose whether your company needs a CPO or just better goal-setting.
Key ideas
- The Missing Middle. The gap between executive strategy and team execution is the most consistent failure mode Perri sees across companies. Executives have a strategy; teams have tickets. Nobody is translating between the two. ‘I have met a lot of organisations that think most of their issues are in the training of their people. And 99% of the time I see that it is actually in the way that they are setting their goals and deploying their strategy.’
- Diagnosing the gap. Ask teams: ‘What is the most important thing you could be doing, and why?’ If the answers do not ladder to company strategy, the problem is strategy deployment, not execution. If executives tell you they do not know what product is doing, the person responsible for that communication is not operating at CPO level.
- When to hire a CPO. Signals: multiple products or complex platform portfolio; geographic expansion; major pivot or merger; executives and board who lack visibility into product direction. As a rough rule: around seven to eight PMs, when the VP of product’s functional scope can no longer cover the strategic and cross-functional complexity.
- VP of product vs CPO. VPs are outstanding functional leaders who can manage a roadmap across PMs and grow junior talent. CPOs additionally: understand the roadmap-to-revenue-to-equity chain; interface confidently with the board and CFO; can oversee product, design, and sometimes engineering under one leadership line.
- The CPO Accelerator. Perri’s programme for VPs and heads of product making the leap to the C-suite. The recurring finding: the gap is not product knowledge but financial fluency and executive communication.