Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

by Melissa Perri

“You’re stuck in the build trap, Chris. To get out, you need to change the way you approach software development, both as a company and as a leader. You have to become product-led. That involves shifting the entire mentality of the organization from delivering to achieving outcomes. You will have to change your structure, your strategy, and not only the way you work but also the policies and rewards governing it.”

The build trap is a terrifying place for companies because it distracts them. Everyone is so focused on shipping more software that they lose sight of what is important: producing value for customers, hitting business goals, and innovating against competitors.

The build trap isn’t just about shipping software. It’s about realizing you have to change the way you’ve always done things. It’s about confusing output-centric measures of progress with real measures of value.

Companies end up in the build trap when they misunderstand value. Instead of associating value with the outcomes they want to create for their businesses and customers, they measure value by the number of things they produce.

Products and services are not inherently valuable. It’s what they do for the customer or user that has the value — solving a problem, for example, or fulfilling a desire or need.

To be strategic and to have people operate strategically, we need to stop judging teams based on the quantity of features shipped. We should instead define and measure value and then celebrate them for delivering on outcomes for our business and users. Then we should build products that help to achieve this.

Product management is the domain of recognizing and investigating the known unknowns and of reducing the universe around the unknown unknowns. Anyone can run with solutions based on known knowns.

The product death cycle is a specific form of the build trap. You are implementing ideas without validating them. It’s not the customer’s job to come up with their own solutions. That is your job. You need to deeply understand their problems and then determine the best solutions for them.

If you anchor yourself with the why, you will be more likely to build the right thing,”

A good strategy is not a plan; it’s a framework that helps you make decisions. Product strategy connects the vision and economic outcomes of the company back to product portfolio, individual product initiatives, and solution options for the teams. Strategy creation is the process of determining the direction of the company and developing the framework in which people make decisions.

Strategy is a deployable decision-making framework, enabling action to achieve desired outcomes, constrained by current capabilities, coherently aligned to the existing context.

If you are changing strategy yearly or monthly, without good reason from data or the market, you are treating your strategy as a plan rather than as a framework.

The unconstrained team is the most frightened and scared to act in the organization. They feel like they cannot make a decision because there are too many options.

It’s not that you don’t have time to innovate; it’s that you are not making time to innovate. To find that space, you’re going to need to say no to some things.

The product-led organization is characterized by a culture that understands and organizes around outcomes over outputs,

Kodak made good strides in trying to innovate, but its organization prevented it from doing so. The company was reactive rather than strategic, waiting too long to respond to a threat.

If there is one main reason I have seen companies fail to make a transition, it’s the lack of leadership buy-in to move to an outcome-oriented company.

So many companies fail slowly. They release products and never measure whether those products do anything.

This is what it means to be customer centric: knowing that the most important thing you can do to create great products is to deeply understand your customers. This is also the core of what it means to be product-led.

Getting out of the build trap is possible, but it takes time and effort. It’s not something that you can easily achieve in a year. It requires not only changing how you work but also how you think as an organization.

Another sign of an unhealthy product management culture is the inability to kill a product or idea that will not help a company reach its goals.

Without a healthy dialogue between a company and its customers, there is no way to truly learn about what the customers want or need.