Melissa Perri Adapts Toyota’s Kata for Product Teams: The Product Kata Explained

In a recent LinkedIn post, Melissa Perri discusses her adaptation of Toyota’s Improvement Kata for modern product development teams, a framework she terms the “Product Kata.” Perri, a renowned product management expert, argues that many teams struggle with shipping features without clear visibility into their impact on key business metrics. She posits that the structured approach of the Product Kata can help bridge this gap.

The Core of the Product Kata

Perri explains that the Product Kata is built upon four fundamental steps, adapted from Mike Rother’s original Improvement Kata designed for manufacturing. These steps are: understanding the direction, analyzing the current state, setting the next goal, and then choosing the specific action or experiment to take. However, Perri observes that many teams often bypass crucial initial stages.

“The most common skip is the first one. Teams jump straight to initiatives without asking what direction they’re actually trying to move in.”

As Melissa Perri notes, this initial step of understanding the overarching direction is frequently overlooked. She emphasizes that a clear vision is not merely a strategic document but a vital constraint that accelerates downstream decision-making.

Challenges in Goal Setting

Perri further elaborates on the common pitfalls in setting goals, particularly the tendency to err on the side of being either too broad or too narrow. She argues that overly broad goals, such as “improve retention,” can lead to paralysis due to the sheer number of potential approaches. Conversely, goals that are too specific, like “increase day-7 retention by 2%,” risk pre-determining the solution before the problem is fully understood.

“Teams either set goals too broad (‘improve retention’) or too narrow (‘increase day-7 retention by 2%’). Too broad paralyzes because there are infinite ways to attack it. Too narrow limits because you’ve already decided on the solution before you’ve understood the problem.”

According to Melissa Perri, this lack of clarity in direction and goals is often the root cause of teams continuously shipping work without seeing corresponding improvements in their metrics. She states that the issue is typically not with execution itself but with the foundational clarity of what successful execution should look like.

Distinguishing Strategy Creation from Deployment

A key insight Perri shares from companies that have adopted the Product Kata is the cessation of confusion between strategy creation and strategy deployment. She highlights that these are distinct activities. Strategy creation involves making high-level choices, typically at the leadership level. Strategy deployment, on the other hand, is the process by which each level of the organization translates that strategy into actionable work within appropriate time horizons.

Connecting Leadership to Team Execution

Perri points out that goals at different organizational levels naturally vary. A Vice President’s objective will differ significantly from a product team’s objective. Similarly, a six-month strategic initiative has a different scope than a two-week experiment. The Product Kata, as Perri explains, provides a shared vocabulary that enables teams to connect these various levels without conflating them into a single, unmanageable backlog.

“The Product Kata gives teams a shared language to connect those levels without collapsing them into one big backlog.”

In her concluding remarks, Melissa Perri prompts readers to reflect on their own team’s goal-setting practices, asking whether they are too broad, too narrow, or appropriately defined. This call to action underscores her belief in the practical applicability and transformative potential of the Product Kata for enhancing product development effectiveness.