Melissa Perri

Melissa Perri is a product management educator, author, speaker, and board advisor. She is currently a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, teaching Product Management to second year MBA students.

Melissa believes the key to creating great products is growing great product leaders. Committed to that mission, she created two online schools: Product Institute, where she has shared her scientific approach to Product Management with over 3500 students, and The CPO Accelerator, which specializes in growing product leaders into Chief Product Officers.

Seeing an opportunity to help executives understand the value of Product Management, Melissa published “Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value,” with O’Reilly Media. In 2014, she wrote the Product Management curriculum for General Assembly’s part time Product Management course, which is still used worldwide today.

Melissa is a board member of Forsta, the leading market research and customer insights platform. In the past, Melissa has consulted with executives around the world to set up their product organizations, advise on product strategy, and train leaders and team members. Her clients include Capital One, Lloyds Bank of England, Spotify, Liberty Mutual, Bynder, AthenaHealth, the Australian Defence Department, and Chewy. Prior to her current position, Melissa was a Product Manager and UX Designer at Capital IQ, Barclays Capital, OpenSky, and Conductor.

Melissa is a highly sought after keynote speaker, having addressed audiences in over 35 countries. Past conferences include Mind the Product, Productized, Industry Conference, Agile Australia, Agile 2017, Lean UX NYC, Lean Agile Scotland, and QCon. In 2017 she was voted Best Product Person by The Product Group, a peer review award that received thousands of nominees worldwide.

Melissa has a degree in Operations Research and Information Engineering from Cornell University.

Books

• Perri, Melissa. Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value. 1st ed. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2018.