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Escaping the Build Trap

By Melissa Perri

1 recommend/use · 4 sourced episodes

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Baseline, Train, Practice, Level-Set

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Build Your Own PM Toolbox (Learning Without Burnout)

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Escaping the Low-Impact PM Death Spiral

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Hire-Experienced vs. Train-Up Decision Matrix

Decide whether to hire an experienced product ops person or train one, based on time and coaching capacity

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Hiring Profiles by Product Ops Pillar

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Impact Estimation in the Unit of Your Goal

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Keep vs. Offload: The PM Decision-Rights Boundary

A clear line for what a PM keeps versus hands to product ops — decision rights never move

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One Product Ladder (Kill the PO/PM Split)

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One-Step-Away Team Goals

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Options-With-A-Recommendation Pushback

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Product-Lens Metrics: Monitoring Product Health vs. Business Health

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Setting Strategy From Data, Then Committing to a Choice

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The Agile Industrial Complex Test

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The Ask-Every-Team Test (Diagnosing a Missing Strategy)

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The 'Can You See What Good Looks Like?' Staffing Test

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The CEO Funding Test

Ask 'if I were CEO, would I fully fund my own team?' to expose whether your work is survivable.

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The Four-Pillar Product Operating Model

Build a product operating model on strategy, org design, product ops and incentives — not a dev framework

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The Product Owner Escape Ladder

Five moves to climb out of the order-taker trap without quitting first

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The Strategy Tree (Deploying Strategy Through the Missing Middle)

Connect team-level work to business outcomes through three linked layers so no one asks why they're building something.

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The Subtractive Goal-Shrinking Exercise

Make a bloated set of goals smaller and more concise each round until one specific, urgent number survives.

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The Three Pillars of Product Operations

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The Three Pillars of Product Operations

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The Value-Framed Product Résumé

Rewrite every bullet from process to problem, decision, and metric moved

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When to Hire a Chief Product Officer

Use portfolio complexity, revenue scale, PM headcount and trigger events — not a title chart — to know it's CPO time.

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Which Product Ops Pillar to Start With

Choose your first product ops investment by company stage and where your biggest fire is

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Writing a Compelling Product Vision

A vision people can picture, that's lofty but not yet achieved, and that says what you won't do.

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