Product Thinking
Melissa Perri
Successful product management isn’t just about training the product managers who work side by side with developers everyday to build better products. It’s about taking a step back, approaching the systems within organizations as a whole, and leveling up product leadership to improve these systems. This is the Product Thinking Podcast, where Melissa Perri will connect with industry leading experts in the product management space, AND answer your most pressing questions about everything product. Join us each week to level up your skillset and invest in yourself as a product leader.
Episodes
Mentioned books
43 snips
May 6, 2026 • 25min
Episode 268: Rethinking What Done Means in Product Ops
Jessica Soroky, product operations leader who built cross-functional cadences at Pendo. Kate Towsey, research ops advisor from BBC and Atlassian who treats knowledge as a managed asset. Trisha Price, product executive and former CPO at Pendo who champions whole-product complete. They discuss redefining done as customers loving the product, treating insights as reusable assets, and cadences that make launches predictable.
23 snips
Apr 22, 2026 • 20min
Episode 267: How OKRs Become Outputs Instead of Outcomes
Josh Seiden, co-founder of Sense & Respond Learning and product design practitioner. Jeff Gothelf, co-founder of Sense & Respond Learning and modern product practices author. Hugo Froes, product operations leader who split OKRs into discovery, build, and outcome. They discuss OKR types, why key results should track behavior change, and how to cascade OKRs thoughtfully rather than copy-paste.
10 snips
Apr 8, 2026 • 16min
Episode 266: Building for Builders
Nan Yu, Head of Product at Linear who builds developer tooling and product experience. He talks about reducing admin burden with faster, more direct tools. He shows how anchoring requests in real moments uncovers real problems. He explains design fixes like flexible date granularity that stop notification spam.
49 snips
Mar 25, 2026 • 30min
Episode 265: How Marketplace Teams Decide What to Build
Mauricio Monico, a product leader with experience at eBay and Wish who led marketplace turnarounds, and Craig Saldanha, Yelp’s Chief Product Officer who codified marketplace decision tenets. They discuss marketplace fundamentals, risks of copying competitors, vetting merchants and delivery quality. They also cover explicit product tenets, balancing two-sided trade-offs, and modeling flywheels for sustainable growth.
23 snips
Mar 11, 2026 • 30min
Episode 264: Product at Scale Inside the World’s Largest Financial Institutions
Vishal Kapoor, Senior VP at Affirm who embeds compliance and metrics into fintech product work. Jameson Troutman, Head of Product at Chase who shifted funding toward product capacity and empowered teams. Marco De Freitas and Amber Brestowski, Vanguard product leaders driving mission-aligned digital transformation. They discuss modernization tied to client outcomes, funding capacity not projects, embedding legal/compliance, and weekly cadences for prioritization.
20 snips
Feb 25, 2026 • 30min
Episode 263: From Product Leader to CEO
Fabrice des Mazery, product leader who frames product work as disciplined investment decisions. Sean Solme Kim, senior product leader from Amazon and TikTok who runs metric-driven, outcome-focused teams. Mercedes Chatfield Taylor, executive search advisor who guides product leaders toward CEO and board readiness. They discuss paths to CEO, building ownership and accountability, and treating product work like investment decisions.
19 snips
Feb 11, 2026 • 17min
Episode 262: Organizing Product Teams Around Value
Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies co-author and team design expert; and Jose Quesada, VP of Product Management at American Express. They discuss organizing teams around value streams not architecture. They cover starting with outcomes, timing transformations, and building psychological safety to learn through experiments. They also link product operations and team design to faster, safer value delivery.
33 snips
Jan 28, 2026 • 20min
Episode 261: AI Implementation in Regulated and High-Trust Industries
Jessica Hall, CPO at Just Eat Takeaway, discusses AI trade-offs and long-term capability building. Magda Armbruster, Head of Product at Natural Cycles, explains embedding QA, regulation, and privacy into daily product work. Maryam Ashoori, AI product expert from IBM Watsonx, breaks down how agents reason, why LLMs hallucinate, and the need for guardrails and human oversight. They focus on risk, cost, simplicity, and governance.
94 snips
Dec 10, 2025 • 9min
Episode 260: Avoiding Common Mistakes in Org Design
Dive into the world of organizational design with insights on structuring product teams around value streams for enhanced efficiency. Discover the pitfalls of too many decision layers and the need for agile control chains. Learn how to define clear roadmap ownership and balance skill sets to minimize delays. Melissa sheds light on avoiding architecture-based organization, stressing the importance of platform teams as scalable allies. Start with a solid product strategy to set your organization up for success!
41 snips
Dec 3, 2025 • 32min
Episode 259: Simplifying AI for Global Customer Impact with Srinivasan Raghavan
Srinivasan Raghavan, Chief Product Officer at Freshworks, shares his journey from engineering to product management. He discusses how AI is transforming product managers into "product builders" by simplifying design and prototyping processes. Srini highlights Freshworks' use of AI agents to enhance customer satisfaction through automation and the importance of creating uncomplicated user experiences. He emphasizes staying customer-focused and embracing real-user insights to drive successful product outcomes.
