Escaping The Build Trap, with Melissa Perri, Product Management Author and Coach

Hey everybody, it's Mike, co-founder of Product Collective, and we're back for another industry interview. Thank you very much for joining us here, and I'm really excited for this particular industry interview because this is with somebody that has a familiar face, Melissa Perry. Melissa, hey, how's it going?

Good, how's it going?

It's going great. Now, Melissa, I know we had the chance to get to, you know, meet last, last year because you had actually come to Cleveland, Ohio to speak at Industry. And that was a lot of fun. Thank you very much for doing that.

It was great. I had a really good time there.

Awesome. And we're, we're, by the way, that's kind of why I, you see the industry picture in the background, which actually that one, and I got the matching shirt. We're about 45 days away from industry this year, so we are very excited for that. So I'm kind of showing my industry pride today. But for, I do want to kind of, before we get into our chat, Melissa, I wanted to share just a little bit of kind of housekeeping things for everybody that's attending this, maybe for the first time. So if you haven't been to an industry interview before, these are sessions where we chat with product leaders really from everywhere and about all sorts of topics. I always love honing in on a specific topic in every chat, but this is a chance not just for me to ask the questions and for, you know, you all to enjoy the answers, but I definitely want to hear questions from you all as well. So you'll notice there is an ask a question section and there's a chat as well. And some of you are already introducing yourself in the chat, which is great. That's what the chat is there to introduce yourself. So, you know, definitely feel free to say who you are, you know, where you're from, maybe what product you're working on. That would be awesome. But the ask a question section, that's where if you have a question for Melissa, ask it there and I will keep track of that. I'll kind of keep tabs there and whether it's maybe we're talking about a specific topic, I might bring your question in right then. Maybe it's towards the end. But, you know, generally these sessions are about 30 minutes. So we'll have a lot of time to get into questions, hopefully many of yours. So definitely use that Ask a Question section. And yeah, we have a lot of these product interviews coming up in the future. So definitely check some of those out that we have already. I think we have one with John Zeratsky coming up. Co-author of the book Sprints. And yeah, so that will be fun. And hopefully you could meet some of y'all in person at Industry. That's October 1st through the 3rd. Actually, the main conference is 2nd and 3rd with the conference workshops happening on the 1st. And if not in Cleveland, Ohio, maybe in the spring of 2019 we'll see you in Dublin, Ireland, because we have the European edition as well. But before we get to all of that, I want to get back to Melissa and let's chat about Escaping the Build Trap, which I know that's a topic that's become really, really important to you, right?

Yes. Yep. That's pretty much what I've been talking about, I feel like, for the past 2 years. So it's really exciting, and the book should be out on it very, very soon. So in the fall of 2018, we'll be publishing it with O'Reilly.

I'm pumped for that. I definitely— I am going to be pre-ordering my copy because I know—

Thank you.

When you spoke at Industry, you know, that is actually one of the most highest-rated talks that we have ever had at Industry. I think a lot of people are interested in that, you know? So, but maybe before we talk about, you know, how we can all escape the build trap as product people, probably should start with like, what is the build trap to begin with? Maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, so the build trap is this concept that companies get into where we focus more on shipping features and trying to get as many things out the door as possible. And we're forgetting about how to connect those features back to what really drives value for our business, for both our users and for the company itself. So, like, companies that are in the build trap, they all kind of look pretty similar. They have very similar traits, right? We're measuring how many features do we ship per quarter, right? We have roadmaps and we have priority lists that are like 80 things long. We're not really going back and iterating on a first version when we put it out there. We just ship it and we're done and we're on to the next project. So a lot of times these companies, right, they're— they— when you look at their products, what happens is they become super, super complex and there's new things coming out every day, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's what customers want. And we usually don't have a feedback loop coming from customers or from data or analytics that tell us that they're using it. So we're not really like measuring and keeping track of these things. We're not strategically aligning our priorities. And so we're just focused on like building, get it out the door, get it out the door, right? Ship it, ship it. Those become our war cries in these companies, like, "Ship it, build it, go!" We also worry a lot about velocity. Everybody talks about velocity, are developers going fast enough? We're worried so much about the fingers on the keyboard, right? How do we make them type faster, rather than how are we strategically moving this business forward? That's the build trap. Tons of companies are actually stuck there. A lot of very successful companies too, right? There's tons of enterprises right now who are going into more agile methodologies and trying to become more software-focused, but they're still kind of suffering from those same problems because they're, they're not realizing that, you know, what made them successful was solving these problems for users. And as we get more and more money, right, we become— and more and more layers in the company— we become distanced from what those users are doing. So we'll get into these internal mindsets where we're just worrying about what we're building, we lose track of what the customers want, and we have so much money that we don't really notice, right? We can burn through that for a very long time and not really see any impact to our business. So it's a really scary place to be. If you're a smaller company, you'll realize you're in the build trap really quickly because you'll run out of money. If you're a larger enterprise, it could take years before you realize that something's really going on.

And I mean, I guess whether they realize they're in the build trap or not, You know, many of them are there, I guess. What is— how can a company take that first step to like, what's it, what is the right first step? Right? Like, why, how can somebody start to right the ship, so to speak?

Yeah, I think it really comes down to the role and that's why I get passionate about this, but I see it as really understanding the difference between like products and projects. And that's why I think the project, the product manager role is so important here because it's not just about like feeding things through somebody who like manages a backlog, right? And that's what I think a lot of people end up in the trap in, in when they go to Scrum, right? We have product owners that kind of just, they're the gatekeeper for the backlog, but they don't really synthesize the stuff coming in. They just add it from stakeholders. Um, but if you organize yourself around products and you really see that product manager role and the role of the company, um, and the role of the teams as creating value for users so we get value in return, right? That starts to change your perspective. So it's all about growing value and trying to figure out what that is. So when I come in to help companies kind of reorganize around this, we do a lot with product management, but we, we kind of try to meet somewhere in the middle. Like, I work with the execs. So with the execs, we're talking about like, okay, tell me about what your company goals are. How do you know you're hitting them? Right? Like, how do you know you're tracking it? And it's the same type of thing on the team level too, right? A lot of teams go, "Oh, we can't really do anything because we don't have buy-in for our users." But you can actually start measuring what your team is doing, right? You know, even if you're in isolation from what the rest of the company is doing. So we'll put analytics in, we'll have teams go out to talk to users, we'll try to get some semblance of feedback if we're on the right path. So I think the first step in trying to get out of the build trap is one, recognize that you're in there. And when I give my talk, most people go, "Yep, that's us." So I'm hoping that that starts sparking conversations. And two is just try to implement the feedback loops wherever possible, right? Even if it's, if it's at the top of trying to like figure out what your goals are and what your value is, if it's on your team, if you're trying to figure out, set the goal, try to figure out if you're actually measuring that goal, if you, how to measure that goal, if you're actually hitting it, right? Just try to get some semblance of data in there to tell you if you're on the right path. I think that's like the first step every company can do.

Yeah. When you had mentioned before, you know, talking about the role of like a product manager, for instance, I know for the attendees on this webinar, attendees at our conference, it is a lot of product managers and certainly some people that are, you know, maybe they're senior product managers or director and VP level. But, you know, there may be the case where there's a product manager watching this saying, yeah, like, I think our company might be in this build trap and I think we should be righting the ship. But, you know, but I'm not, I'm not the CEO. Like, do you have advice for how people might be able to sort of work within their organizations to maybe like start to change the culture? I guess, what advice might you give to that product manager?

Yeah, I see that a lot and I got that, I get that every day, right? I'm just one person, how do I affect change, right? And my advice for product managers is you can step up and try to show how it should be with your team. It's really possible. It's uncomfortable, right? Because nobody else is doing it. So you're going to be the first one. but it's totally possible to start trying to do that. So my advice for, I will say this. So because I work with executives, I usually come into these companies, right? And the executives tell me like, go train all our product managers, like make them better product managers. And I'll say, what's wrong? You know, why aren't they, you know, why aren't they performing like you expect them to? And they're like, oh, they just don't know how to do their job. What do you expect their job to be? And they say they want them to own the product and push towards delivering value. So like the C-level kind of understands a little bit what product managers do. I think sometimes it gets lost a little bit throughout the organization as you go down to the teams, but the C-levels understand that it's supposed to be driving. And what they're looking for is for product managers to step up and say, this is where I believe we should be going. Like, I synthesize the data. I understand our goals. I did the work to figure out where our strategy is. I worked with our team. We tested these things. We have data. I think we should go this way. Like, I will place my bet here. And a lot of times we get so bogged down in the day-to-day work, right? I've had product owners last year on teams tell me they don't have any time to be forward-looking because they're working with developers every day and they're in Scrum meetings all the time and they're, you know, they're answering all these questions. So it's about like, you can start with yourself, right? How do you carve out space to give yourself room to strategically think about those things and put together a compelling case, right? How do you make space? How do you take some of those roles and responsibilities? Like there's, there's ones where I have product owners saying, you know, they got a ton of questions from developers all day, every day about what they were building. So to me, and they were saying, we can't be strategic because, you know, we're in, we're in these meetings all day, every day and clarifying everything. But to me, that's saying like you didn't set context well enough at the beginning, right? So you don't, you're answering questions because you didn't, align around what you were supposed to be building. So let's figure out how we can do that earlier, and then you won't be dealing with all this swirl later on, right? Like, how do we change up some of the ways that we work to take some of that pressure off of you? Or how do we diagnose how our processes might be adding more work than we need? So that's always my advice for product managers. It's like, try to figure out how to create that space because you don't have to do it all. And I know, like, when I, when I was a product manager too on teams, I was a little bit of a control freak. I wanted to do it all, right? I was like, no, give me that, I'll manage it, I'll do it, right? And you take on so much work and then you don't give yourself space to actually do some of the important stuff, which is doing that forward thinking stuff. So I always say like to teams, you have an opportunity to try to get ahead, right? If you can try to get ahead and everybody complains like, oh, my manager just gives me what to do, right? They're doing that because you're not getting ahead. Try to get ahead of your manager, try to understand what the goals are, and try to come to them with propositions and then they will stop feeding you work usually. Right. So, so those types of things, um, I've seen work, like we've implemented them in, in a lot of companies that I've worked with and it doesn't work all the time. I will not, I'm not going to lie. This doesn't, it's not a foolproof method, but I've seen a lot of perception change and a lot of the way that people work inside their company change about what product managers are. Yeah. And it's all about, it's like that proactive rather than reactive. Strategy, right? We're being reactive when people are handing us stuff and we're going out and doing it, right? But if you were synthesizing the data and looking ahead, you're being proactive, you're getting ahead, and then you're planting seeds, and then people can react to that afterwards.

I think, no, I think that's great feedback, especially for people that are, you know, we're all busy doing all the things that we have to do, you know, in the day-to-day. But so to think ahead like that, but it's like a good reminder for all of us that's important. I'm curious for, you know, the organizations that you come into contact with where, you know, they are caught in that trap, they want to get out of it, they even, you know, want to start taking the steps to get out of it, but they still stay stuck in that trap. I'm just wondering if there are common mistakes people make that might be good for all of us to be aware of and look out for. What's your take on that?

Yeah, I will say, like, I've worked at some places that had these ambitions to go through these massive transformations, right? So, like, a lot of companies I've come into, they're, you know, a couple billion dollar companies in valuation. They've got thousands of people, 5,000 people more, and they want to go through a big massive agile transformation. And then basically they get left with, oh, we have hundreds of thousands of product owners. What do we do with them? So that's usually where I come in. And I've worked with them for years, right? And the ones that slip back, it's because they fall back in old habits and they don't realize that transforming yourself, right, to get out of the bill trap, to move to an outcome mindset, to, to be focused more on value and solving customer problems and creating business value with that, it's a mindset shift. And when I work with the C-levels, I tell them, like, unless you're bought into this and you're driving it, right, it's not really going to happen, right? We can, we can always bubble up things bottom up, I think, and show people what it's like. And the more you see it, the more comfortable you get. So it's about coming, coming down with the direction of, I understand that this is a long-term thing, but bubbling up a lot of useful things that we're doing in the feedback so that the executives can see that it's working, right? So you need to approach it both ways when you do a big transformation. The companies that fail at that, right, the executives think it's going to be like Oh, it's all on you guys, right? Like, let's just go train my product owners and we'll be fine. And it's like, no, no, no, you have to change your whole perception and your strategy in the way that you think. So executives who get that, you can see like the organization starts turning, right? It will make the move. Executives who don't get that, they'll get stuck in the bill trap. But likewise, there's a bunch of executives who do get it. And then there's a bunch of team members who are not quite on board, right? Or they, or they get back into their old habits, and it gets really easy to get really, really busy, or this is a huge one, we swamp people with all this work while we're also trying to teach them how to think differently, and then they have no room to try anything new. So that's a really common one. I see people, if people don't make space for learning, right, I see them get stuck in the middle trap all the time. Yeah.

Well, I would imagine too, I mean, this takes time, right? This is a process that it's like changing the way that the organization is approaching how to work, can't imagine that that's— there's no quick fix, right? I'd imagine this is something that takes time. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, totally. And I think if you look at like some of the more successful agile transformations, like ING, ING will tell you that they've been going through an agile transformation for 12 years, like 12 years. Everybody thinks this is going to be our 1-year mandate and then we're going to be agile. Yay. But ING is like, no, we've been doing this for 12 years. We're still just getting to the product part of it and we're just dealing with budgeting and strategy and all these things that make it really, really hard to be agile without it, right? To have this whole like top-down approach and this product focus that we're talking about. So it's, it's a long haul, right? It's not gonna be like, oh, we'll do this for 6 months and then we'll move on to something else, right? Like it's about changing culture and that takes like a long time.

Yeah. There, there's a couple audience questions that are coming in here, so I wanna, Maybe I'll kind of point to them for right now. One of the questions, it goes back to what we were talking about before about being proactive as that product person. And the question was, how do you suggest looking ahead while balancing the need to be proactive to, you know, immediate customer requests, needs, that sort of thing?

Yeah. So I think it's about not— and this will sound like slightly counterintuitive, but I think it's about when you're getting those requests in, and those things to do, it's about not jumping in immediately and solving it, right? Some things will be easy and they're low-hanging fruit and it's like, great, let's kill it, right? But a lot of times, right, customers will— customers will— are these data points, right, that are coming in the form of the feature requests, but they actually signal something bigger, and I should be thinking about it more in the strategic terms of how how can I turn this into a bigger product or a bigger feature or a bigger release that will solve a deeper problem, right? So it's about, we get into this habit, right? Whenever we get feedback from customers or we talk to somebody where they say, I want this, I want that, you should do this, right? And we jump at it. So instead of jumping, it's about just taking a step back for a minute, looking at it, analyzing it and saying, is this relevant and something that I can do right now? Or is this signaling that there might be a deeper problem that we should actually look at? And that can help you build your case, right, of things that we should go after and explore that will be more of that proactive piece. So I think it's about, it's all about balancing this, right? It's all about trade-offs. There are, as you know, product management, it's about making decisions, right? So sometimes we probably shouldn't act on these immediate customer requests coming in or these needs. Sometimes we have to know that, hey, this is actually not going to kill everything, right? Like they want this feature, they're complaining about it, But is it— is that more valuable or less valuable than us going after something bigger, right? Or can I solve this problem in a different way than I immediately think and turn that into more of a strategic focus? So I think it's really about balancing those two things and synthesizing it, maybe looking at the request in a different way.

And I know firsthand, you know, I remember some of the customers that I had when I was managing software products. The noisiest ones didn't necessarily represent the views of all too.

Exactly. Yeah.

There's also that.

Well, that's great.

There's another question that seems like a couple of people are voting up here, so I want to make sure I can ask it. And it goes back when you were talking about sort of creating that space. The question was, how do you suggest executives and managers can create that space for product people, product managers to get ahead?

Yeah. So this is about kind of capacity planning and portfolio planning, which I talk a lot about in my book. And I will say, this is by far the biggest issue I see at companies. We overload people and we give them like mandates of what to go do and ship, but we don't let them actually bubble up things of where to go. Right? So in any given time in a company, projects and teams, right? Teams will be working on projects for a product that will be all at all different states, right? And the products will be at all different states. Some products are like steady state, Maintainability, right? Like, you just, you just take care of a couple bugs, it'll be fine. Other things, you know, you're in this huge growth path and you're adding features and features and features and features, right? But some of those teams might be well into the way of a very validated feature, and it's about executing and getting it out the door because we, we already validated it. Other ones need to go out and do research, right? And yet we usually manage all these teams kind of at the same way. Right? We give them the same processes and they all manage and they all do the things at the same time. And we're not looking at our portfolio to say like, hey, some of this stuff is unvalidated. We need to give people space to go explore it and see if it's actually a viable thing to go after. Some of this other stuff over here, you know, that's validated, that's going to be, you know, slotted into a roadmap and eventually shipped, right? Like we have to start considering it different ways. So, um, chief product officers, right, or VPs of product, um, who oversee many different product lines, We tell them you have to, like, start thinking in portfolios or team, team levels about people being at different states, right? You have to start thinking about how do I make sure that not everybody is just in full execution mode, but we still have people looking ahead over here to help generate that stuff. And you should go through cycles with that with all your teams as well. So it's all about kind of deploying strategy at that level. So managers, executives, they're responsible for for setting those outcomes and setting the direction, but not saying how you're actually going to achieve it, right? It's saying that, you know, this year we're going to try to grow revenue, you know, 20%, it's going to be huge, right? That's, that's our goal. That's what we want to do. How are we going to do that? And that the product teams basically go out and say, okay, well, this is our product portfolio. Here's, here's opportunities for us to actually get more money. These are the ones that we should explore. We think we should prioritize it this way. And then they bubble up the ideas of how to get there. And then the teams figure out what are the features that we should be actually adding or deleting or anything that we should be doing to help execute on that stuff. Yeah, gotcha.

That's great. And these are great questions, by the way. Keep asking them. I want to make sure that we might be able to come back to a couple more audience questions. But I wanted to— I want to make sure that I asked you, Melissa, about, about the book. I mean, we're talking about escaping the build trap. That's what the book's all about. That's, you know, you speak a lot on that topic. I know if folks came to Industry, they heard a little bit about it, but I want to make sure that you could kind of mention more about the book. Like if somebody maybe has seen your talk on this, like what might they expect, you know, even more about the topic in the book? Like what's different about your talk and the book?

Maybe you could just share a little bit about that. I think so. The talk goes over some broad ideas for the book, but I tried to make the book a very comprehensive guide to How does an organization get set up to be really product-led? And I wanted it to be something, uh, and this was probably the hardest part of why it's taken so long to write, but I wanted it to be something where an executive could pick it up and say like, hmm, I get this, right? Like, I understand why this is valuable, but also for a product manager on a team to go, oh, like, I understand now what's missing in my organization and why this is maybe so hard for me. Here's some things I can do to start getting on it. Right. It's supposed to be like a very comprehensive look at how do you set up good product management organizations and how does that help you get out of the build trap, right? Like what are those key components that are missing? So it goes over a lot of the role of a product manager and what makes a great product manager. And that's at every level, right? Like what's the career path? You know, what does a CPO do that's different than a product manager on a team? What are the responsibilities? How does it change as you go up? It looks at how do you translate strategy from a business perspective into a product perspective, right? How do you deploy goals? How do you think about those outcomes? And then how do you do a process for the team, right? How should you think as an organization about the team's bubble up thing, bubbling up those ideas of how to like actually reach those goals, right? So what's the process that we do there, which is basically like uncovering the problem, testing and figuring out where we should go, and then, you know, standardizing that and trying to figure out how do we create a concept around this or an initiative around this. To actually pass it. Yeah. And then it goes—

No, I was just going to say, it sounds like it's pretty well suited for that executive, but also for individual contributor, you know, product managers as well. It's sort of like no matter where you are within the chain, sounds like it'd be something that'd be pretty helpful.

Yeah. And I think too, it helps you kind of position yourself, especially if you're thinking about becoming a product manager, like group lead or a director of product, right. And you want to figure out how do I, How do I roll up? Like my, my goal, I feel like what I've gotten passionate about over the last couple of years is I realized that we're kind of at a shift now where product management is slightly a new field and we're just going to have more and more product managers as we go. Right. There's no, we're not going to get less. It's going to be more. And everybody who isn't in the individual contributor level right now, right? Like the people who are there, they will be CPOs one day. So I wanted to equip them to be the best CPOs we have out there to go after, you know, the best products. So like that, that's kind of been my, my kind of like mission is how do we create future leaders of product and how do we take the companies that we have today and make them better and more proficient at being good product companies? Yeah, that's great.

Awesome. I want to go back to, I see another audience, actually a couple more questions came in, so I want to when I get to one of those. Somebody had asked, how do you— how often do you recommend updating higher-level stakeholders? So, you know, I suppose for them that, you know, it's updating the rest of the organization and maybe at that executive level when you are that product manager. I don't know if you have thoughts on that.

I think it's— so it's about really trying to figure out how do you get into a cadence. So one of the things that we do when we come into companies, and maybe this is something that you could take on as a project at your company, company as well, is we try to create cadences to reevaluate strategy, right? So there's— most of the companies operate on like that yearly budgeting cycle, and then we go into like the releases, and we don't have something that kind of comes, uh, in between. So what we try to do is we, we try to figure out who's the right conversation and what's the right priorities here. And we usually have like a company reevaluating their business objectives and what kind of, you know, growth numbers do we want to make, those types of things. That's like on a yearly cadence. We just check in sometimes, make sure we're on the right path. If we look down at the initiative level of like products, right, we're looking at that kind of at a, you know, quarterly basis, maybe. Large companies, maybe every 6 months, depending on how long it takes you to ship. But that's like, are we making dedicated progress towards what we're trying to get to? And then on a team level, right, we're looking at maybe monthly, right? Like monthly, quarterly, big updates to higher-level stakeholders, right? but like monthly to the immediate people that you affect so that they can see what's happening. So I think it's all about how do you create a good standardization and cadence for reporting so people feel informed. Um, you don't have to— I don't think you have to overcommunicate, but you have to figure out strategically, how do I go out there and tell people and let them know what's coming? Um, as long as you're coordinating, I think, with like product marketing and sales, like ahead of releases, agnostic to that, that should always be happening. It's about finding a groove for the amount of times that you ship and how often it changes so that people feel like you're getting ahead of it and they understand why you're prioritizing and doing that. But it's also about communicating it to the right level at the right time. Like executives, the C-level, they don't need to know what you're doing every day, right? Like they don't, they probably don't even need to know what you're doing every month. They want to understand like, what are you doing this quarter? That's gonna help me meet my goals by the end of the year, right? Like what's that push, right? So it's kind of the VP's job or the director's job right there to synthesize the information from the teams and communicate in a way that they care about at the C-level. Great.

There's one more, we'll have time for one more audience question, at least anyway. And this was specifically, you know, within a B2B SaaS environment, they were asking, it was just what advice would you have for balancing customer requests, but that are related to renewals versus, you know, kind of looking ahead, future product strategy, longer-term product strategy.

So one thing is if you don't have a future long-term product strategy, it's going to be incredibly hard to decide, right? So that's usually where the problem comes from, right? They're like, oh, we're losing this renewal, let's get it in there. But we don't actually have a really well-defined and well-communicated strategy for what we're going to do next. So then, you know, of course we're going to prioritize what the renewals are, because we're only looking at that as our area of revenue. So to me, this is, this is two-pronged stuff, right? If you have a really clear strategy of what you should be doing, what it does is it communicates how you're going to get money through that. And then I can look at, and that's what your product strategy should do. It should be like very well laid out, you know, probably rolled up a couple levels, but laid out where it's saying, we are doing these things that will affect this type of, you know, gross margin or top lines or revenue or financials, right? Then you can clearly compare what you wanna do for renewals and figure out how to balance it and what's maybe acceptable churn, right? Maybe there's, this happened with one of the clients I had, tons of feature requests coming in, but it was actually for clients that we didn't wanna service anymore, yet we were like spinning our wheels trying to, respond to them, but there was this acceptable level of churn there where we were saying, actually, we can let a few of these go, some of these harder ones, because if we don't do this, we're going to do this instead, and it's going to make us more money. Right? So I think it's all about having a really clear, defined alternative to be able to push back and say like, hey, this is only going to get us this much money, but if we put our resources here, we're going to get that much, right? It's about that. That's kind of where I get to portfolio planning.

Yeah, thank you. And I'd love to ask you like a million more questions, but we're pretty much towards the end of our time. I was wondering if there's like one for people that are sitting here and, you know, they're taking, they're taking this in, they're soaking it all up, but there's this one big takeaway or something that folks could do like right now, you know, sort of to get started on this. What might that be as sort of a final piece of advice?

Yeah, wherever you can, go talk to a customer. Like if you have not talked to a customer, if you've not gotten out to talk to users, I can't stress like how, one, it's easier than most people think. And I've done this in highly, highly regulated industries, including healthcare. And I've also done it in banks. I've done it everywhere. And I've heard people say, yeah, I can't talk to users. If you can go just find a user, even if it's like through a friend of a friend on Facebook and just talk to them about their experience, a lot of times it's so enlightening and you'll learn so much from those conversations. And that will help you really understand what user value is, right? You can't understand what user value is, what customer value is, which translates into business value at the end of the day until you really talk to your customers. So if there's anything you're going to take home from that, I would say one thing that you can do, what you can control, is trying to go out and talk to somebody. That's great.

I love that piece of advice. Thank you. And, and thanks for being here. I, you know, for people that want to, whether it's continue the conversation, learn more about your work, How might they be able to do that?

Yeah, if you have any more questions, feel free to tweet me on Twitter @Lissijean, L-I-S-S-I-J-E-A-N. I'm happy to answer more questions. I blog at melissaperry.com and under my company productslabs.com. Hopefully the book will be out sometime in October. I can finally say that. It's been a lot of 2 years of learning, but I'm always reachable through those channels or drop me a line at melissaperry.com. You can get me through the little message thing on the bottom.

Awesome. And I would say wherever Melissa is speaking, you definitely should try to catch her because like I said, it was a great talk and one of the best we've had at industry. So thank you again for that. And thank you for joining us, Melissa. I really appreciate it.

Thanks. It was great being here.

All right. And thanks everybody for joining us. Again, hopefully you could join us for a future session, but we will see you all very soon. See you later.

Bye.