Hello Reader,

The best product strategy in the world dies in the room where you explain it badly.

I've watched it happen for years. A PM who did the hard thinking walks into a stakeholder meeting and loses the room in ten minutes. Not because the work was wrong, but because of how they talked about it. Features instead of the outcomes those features drive. A backlog handed to executives with "help me prioritize this." A roadmap presented as a promise, then quietly missed a quarter later.

Communication is the skill that decides whether anyone trusts you with the strategy. It's also the one almost nobody gets coached on.

The feedback gap

Think about where you actually get feedback. Your metrics. Your roadmap. Maybe your writing. Almost never the thing that decides your credibility: how you showed up in the room, and whether the person across the table walked out convinced.

When that feedback does come, it's usually years late and lands in a performance review as "work on your executive presence," with nothing specific you can do on Monday.

I wanted to close that gap.

A communication coach inside your meeting notes

I've been taking my notes in Granola for over a year now. It's an AI notepad, and there's no bot barging into your call. You jot down what matters the way you always have, it transcribes in the background, and afterward you can chat with your notes.

The part I got excited about is Recipes: pre-made prompts you run on any conversation. So I made one, and made it available to all of you.

It's called Product Communication Coach, and it does what I would do if I sat in on your meeting. It reads your notes from a call where you talked roadmaps, tradeoffs, priorities, or hard feedback, and it tells you what landed, what you missed, and how to show up better next time.

I built it on the principles I drill with every leader I work with: lead with outcomes, make your tradeoffs visible, get stakeholders to align on what matters most instead of handing them your backlog to sort, and never save everything for one big reveal.

It won't replace practice. Nothing does. But it turns the meetings you already sit through into a way to get sharper, with feedback the same day instead of at your next review.

You'll find it in Granola under my name. Run it on your next stakeholder meeting, and if you're new, you can get 3 months of Granola for free with the code PRODUCTINSTITUTE.

Full disclosure: I partnered with Granola on this, but I used their product way before this partnership, and the recipe is genuinely mine.

What's the last meeting you walked out of knowing you'd lost the room, without being able to say exactly where it went wrong?

Until next time, Melissa Perri Founder Product Institute, Board Member, and Teacher

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