Melissa Perri (00:00:00): Do you want to hire 10,000 product managers and let them all do these things off the side of their desk and then concentrate on strategic work 30% of the time or do you want them concentrating on strategic work majority of the time and then help build a product operations team around them that can create these shared systems and this infrastructure to allow them to work better? Lenny (00:00:25): Today, my guests are Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles. This is a rare two-guest episode. Melissa and Denise are authors of an awesome new book called Product Operations: How Successful Companies Build Better Products at Scale. Melissa is a legend in the product management community. She's the author of the foundational handbook, Escaping the Build Trap. She runs a product management training organization called Produx Labs, teaches product management at Harvard, and has worked with hundreds of companies on their product management function. Denise is a product leader, coach, and consultant helping companies with their product vision, strategy, and execution, and works with Melissa at Produx Labs. (00:01:02): In our conversation, we get super deep into the emerging role of product ops. As you'll hear in our conversation, over the past few years, this role has gone from almost non-existent to something like half of scaling tech companies with at least one product ops person. This new role is probably the thing that's most changing in the role of product management. After this conversation, I'm convinced it's a great thing. (00:01:24): We chat about what the role concretely is, how it differs from product management and project management, what to look for in your first product ops hire, how to roll out a product ops function, why product managers shouldn't be afraid of this role and how your life gets significantly better, plus, a case study on how they rolled out product ops function at a large company, and so much more. With that, I bring you Me...