Reading Notes

Melissa Perri on Strategy Deployment, the Missing Middle, and When to Hire a CPO

Source: Melissa Perri on Strategy Deployment, the Missing Middle, and When to Hire a CPO

Notes — Melissa Perri on Strategy Deployment, the Missing Middle, and When to Hire a CPO

Four questions [Adler frame]

Q1 — What is this about? A diagnostic conversation about the most consistent failure mode in product-led companies at the scale-up stage: the gap between executive strategy and team execution (the Missing Middle). Perri draws on eight-plus years of consulting across Fortune 50 companies, banks, pharma, and high-growth SaaS to describe what this gap looks like, how to detect it, and what structural interventions close it — including when a Chief Product Officer is genuinely needed versus when the problem is something else.

Q2 — How is it argued? From pattern recognition across many company visits. Perri’s diagnostic method is direct: walk into the company, ask teams what they’re working on and why, attempt to trace those answers to company strategy. If the tracing fails, the Missing Middle is confirmed. She also uses the negative: what the symptom looks like from the executives’ perspective (they don’t know what product is doing).

Q3 — Is it true? The Missing Middle diagnosis is credible and well-observed. The prescription — hire a CPO at around seven to eight PMs when multi-product complexity arrives — is reasonable as a heuristic but depends heavily on the CPO market and the specific company context. The VP-of-product-vs-CPO distinction (functional leader vs executive with board-level financial fluency) is a useful and often-missing framing.

Q4 — What of it? The most actionable takeaway: run the diagnostic before assuming the problem is people training. Ask each team ‘what is the most important thing you could be doing and why?’ If the answers don’t trace to company priorities, the problem is structural. The fix is a CPO or equivalent with the authority to translate strategy into goals, not a PM training programme.

Glossary

Missing Middle — The gap between executive strategic intent and team-level execution in a product organisation. Executives have a strategy; teams have tickets; nobody translates between them. See Missing Middle.

Build trap — Building and shipping features as the measure of product success, without verifying that those features are creating customer or business value. See books/Escaping the Build Trap.

CPO (Chief Product Officer) — An executive-level product leader with financial fluency, board communication skills, and scope beyond just product management. Distinguished from a VP of Product (a functional leader) by strategic authority and cross-functional scope.

Strategy deployment — The process of converting executive-level strategic intent into team-level goals, roadmaps, and prioritised work. The act of making strategy operative.

The Missing Middle diagnostic

Perri’s field method: visit a cross-section of product teams and ask two questions:

  1. What are you working on?
  2. What is the most important thing you could be doing right now, and why?

If the answers don’t ladder to company strategy — if teams can’t articulate the connection between their sprint work and company goals — the Missing Middle is confirmed.

From the executive side, the symptom is: ‘I don’t really know what is going on in tech or product. I have no idea if we are achieving our goals.’ When executives say this, the product leader responsible for that communication is not operating at CPO level.

When to hire a CPO

Perri’s signals:

  • Moving from single-product to multi-product (more than two products, complex portfolio emerging)
  • Geographic expansion or entry into substantially new markets
  • Major pivot, merger, or acquisition requiring unified product direction
  • Executives and board lacking visibility into what product is building and why
  • Rough PM headcount trigger: around seven to eight PMs, when the functional PM scope grows beyond what a VP of product can hold alongside strategy and executive communication

Important caveat: if the scope is narrow (product only, no design or analytics), a VP of product may suffice longer. A CPO is specifically warranted when someone needs to own product, design, and potentially engineering under one line, or when executive and board navigation requires a C-level title.

VP of product vs CPO

VP of product:

  • Functional leader over product management
  • Can manage a multi-PM roadmap
  • Good at implementing product processes
  • Can grow junior talent
  • Often lacks full financial fluency or board-level communication skills

CPO:

  • Understands the full chain from roadmap to revenue to equity value
  • Can project that chain confidently to the board and CFO
  • Navigates cross-functional executive relationships (with CRO, CFO, sometimes CTO)
  • Can oversee product, design, analytics, sometimes engineering under one line
  • The additional scope is the differentiator, not just the title

The training trap

Most companies that have a Missing Middle diagnose it as a talent or training problem. ‘I’ve met a lot of organisations that think most of their issues are in the training of their people.’ The appeal of this diagnosis: it is less threatening than admitting strategic or structural failure. PM training programmes are visible, bounded, and feel like action.

Perri’s counter: 99% of the time the real problem is goal-setting and strategy deployment, not individual PM skill. Training individuals in a broken strategic deployment system produces better-trained individuals trapped in the same broken system.

See also