Why Product Transformations Fail: Melissa Perri on Governance and Culture

In a recent LinkedIn post, Melissa Perri, a prominent voice in product management, discusses a common pitfall that leads to the failure of product transformations within organizations. Perri argues that many companies focus solely on adopting new practices, such as agile methodologies or product discovery techniques, without addressing the underlying governance structures and organizational culture, ultimately dooming these initiatives.

Perri highlights a recurring pattern: companies invest in training for their teams, who then learn and implement new ways of working, like running experiments and framing work around outcomes. However, this progress is often short-lived. As Perri explains:

The pattern happens all the time. A company invests in training. Teams learn discovery, they run experiments, they start framing work as outcomes. The capability gets built and the teams feel like they are making progress. Then the quarterly business review arrives, and teams are only asked about committed features and delivery dates. No discussion on what they are learning. No room for debating tradeoffs in terms of ROI. Just “when will this be done?” “Can you fit this in too?” Within two cycles, teams quietly go back to the old way, and leadership concludes that the training didn’t take.

According to Perri, the issue isn’t that the training is ineffective, but rather that the organization’s existing systems actively reject the new practices.

The Critical Role of Governance Cadences

Perri emphasizes that governance cadences are the true decision-making points in large companies, often more so than strategy documents or roadmaps. These recurring meetings, where investments are confirmed or revoked, dictate the operational model. If these reviews prioritize feature commitments over learning and ROI, the organization remains project-based, regardless of the training provided.

Perri elaborates on what constitutes effective governance:

Governance cadences are where strategy actually gets decided in a large company. Not in the strategy document, and not on the roadmap, but in the recurring meetings where investment is confirmed or pulled, and in the artifacts those meetings require. If your review cadence has one meeting that asks for feature commitments, you have a project based operating model regardless of what your teams have been trained to do.

A well-designed governance model, as outlined by Perri, involves multiple layers of meetings that focus on learning, metric performance, and resulting adaptations. These reviews should facilitate discussions on ROI and tradeoffs at an executive level, rather than getting bogged down in feature-level details. This structured approach ensures alignment with the company’s strategic direction.

Culture as the Foundation for Change

Beyond governance, Perri stresses the indispensable role of organizational culture. She posits that without a culture that supports and rewards new ways of working, even the best governance structures will falter. Leaders’ actions and the questions they ask are paramount in reinforcing desired practices.

Perri advocates for a top-down approach to change, suggesting that executives should redesign review processes before implementing new practices. This ensures that the new behaviors have a supportive environment in which to take root.

Executive Responsibility in Governance Redesign

Redesigning the governance layer is identified as a core executive responsibility. Perri notes that this is a challenging task, as leaders typically have limited opportunities to refine these systems. Success hinges on the culture and the leaders’ commitment to asking the right questions and focusing on outcomes. As Melissa Perri states:

Redesigning the governance layer of a product organization is squarely executive work, and it is one of the harder things to learn on your own because you only get a few attempts at it. It only works if the culture, and the actions of the leaders, backs it up by asking the right questions and focusing on the outcomes.

Ultimately, Perri concludes that without a supportive culture, governance will fail, and teams will revert to practices that are visibly rewarded and discussed. She encourages leaders to examine their own behaviors and their impact on the practices they expect from their teams, suggesting that focusing on culture and governance is key to successful and lasting product transformations.