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

by Melissa Perri

The build trap is when organizations become stuck measuring their success by outputs rather than outcomes. It’s when they focus more on shipping and developing features rather than on the actual value those things produce.

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.

Every feature you build and any initiative you take as a company should result in some outcome that is tied back to that business value.

When companies do not understand their customers’ or users’ problems well, they cannot possibly define value for them. Instead of doing the work to learn this information about customers, they create a proxy that is easy to measure. “Value” becomes the quantity of features that are delivered, and, as a result, the number of features shipped becomes the primary metric of success.

You have to get to know your customers and users, deeply understanding their needs, to determine which products and services will fulfill needs both from the customer side and the business side.

To realize the maximum value, organizations need to have the right individuals, the right processes, the right policies, the right strategy, and the right culture.

The real role of the product manager in the organization is to work with a team to create the right product that balances meeting business needs with solving user problems.

“The biggest thing I’ve learned in product management is to always focus on the problem. If you anchor yourself with the why, you will be more likely to build the right thing,”

The danger is when a product manager is 100% operational, focusing only on the process of shipping products and not on optimizing the feature from a holistic standpoint. When they only optimize for the day-to-day execution of the team, they usually fall behind in the strategy and visioning work that is needed for the success of the features.