Melissa Perri
Product management consultant, educator, author, and podcast host. Founder and CEO of Product Institute, which trains product managers across Fortune 500 and Fortune 50 companies. Author of Escaping the Build Trap (2018) and Product Operations (2023). Host of The Product Thinking Podcast.
Perri’s work sits at the intersection of product management practice and large-scale organisational transformation. She is particularly known for her critique of SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) and for articulating why the product owner role — as defined in Scrum — is structurally insufficient as a substitute for genuine product management.
Background
Began as a product manager in startup environments around 2011, where she first encountered Scrum. From roughly 2014–15 onwards she was regularly engaged by large enterprises (banks, pharmaceutical companies, insurance firms) attempting agile or digital transformations, and has trained PM organisations at almost every Fortune 50 company. She has worked inside companies including Athenahealth on multi-year transformation programmes.
Key positions
- The product owner role emerged from Scrum (a developer-originated methodology) and was never designed to encompass the full scope of product management.
- SAFe provides a legible operating model for executives but fails to teach product discovery, strategy, or how to connect delivery to business outcomes; almost every organisation that “succeeds” with SAFe ends up departing significantly from it.
- Agile certifications (CSPO, etc.) are primarily a revenue mechanism for the “agile industrial complex” and are not a reliable proxy for product management ability.
- Effective transformation requires a mix of trained incumbents and experienced external hires — interspersed at director/VP level — so that there is an in-house model of good practice to learn from.
- A single PM career ladder (associate PM → PM → senior PM) should replace the dual product owner/product manager track; the two titles create structural barriers to career growth and confuse accountability.