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

by Melissa Perri

We look at what it means to become and be a product-led organization (Figure P-1), which involves four key components: Creating a product manager role with the right responsibilities and structure Enabling those product managers with a strategy that promotes good decision making Understanding the process of determining what product to build, through experimentation and optimization Supporting everyone with the right organizational policies, culture, and rewards to allow product management to thrive

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.

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.

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.

Outputs are easily quantified things that we produce — number of products or features, number of releases, or velocity of development teams. Outcomes are the things that result when we finally deliver those features and the customer problems are solved. True value is realized in these outcomes, both for the business and for the user or customer.

Product-led companies optimize for their business outcomes, align their product strategy to these goals, and then prioritize the most effective projects that will help develop those products into sustainable drivers of growth.

Known unknowns are clarified enough that you know which question to ask. They are assumptions that you want to test, data points that you can investigate, or problems that you can identify and explore. You use discovery methods and experimentation to clarify these, turn them into facts, and build to satisfy those facts.

Product management is the domain of recognizing and investigating the known unknowns and of reducing the universe around the unknown unknowns.

Being a great product manager takes a thorough understanding of your users, a careful analysis of your systems, and an ability to see and execute on opportunities for your market.

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.

Project managers are responsible for the when. When will a project finish? Is everyone on track? Will we hit our deadline? Product managers are responsible for the why? Why are we building this? How does it deliver value to our customers? How does it help meet the goals of the business?

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.

A product manager must be tech literate, not tech fluent. That means they can discuss enough and understand enough about the technology to talk to developers and to make trade-off decisions.

“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,”

product owner is a role you play on a Scrum team. Product manager is a career.

I’ve trained dozens of teams who are using SAFe, and I have never seen it work well. Although the appeal of having a framework that lays out everything you need to do technology-wise in nice neat boxes sounds appealing, in practice it usually breaks down. The product owners are disconnected from their users and incapable of creating effective solutions because they do not understand the problems well. The product managers are essentially Waterfalling down the requirements, and the teams are not allowed to prove whether these are the right things to build. No one is doing validation work.

I teach my clients that product managers in senior roles (VPs, product leads, or middle managers) concentrate on defining the vision and strategy for the teams based on market research, an understanding of company goals and strategy, and by looking at the current state of success of their products. The product managers without Scrum teams or with smaller teams (a UX designer and one developer, for example) help validate and contribute to that strategy for future products. After we validate the direction, we create larger Scrum teams around these people and build out solutions.

Tactical work for a product manager focuses on the shorter-term actions of building features and getting them out the door. It includes the daily activities of breaking down and scoping out work with the developers and designers, in addition to crunching the data to determine what to do next.

Strategic work is about positioning the product and the company to win in the market and achieve goals. It looks at the future state of the product and the company and what it will take to get there.

Operational work is about tying the strategy back to the tactical work. Here is where product managers create a roadmap that connects the current state of the product to the future...

A lot of companies have added a product owner title, which includes with the same responsibilities we discussed in the previous chapter on this topic. They see this as an entry-level role preceding that of product manager. As I explained earlier, when you think of a product manager as looking at only strategy and of a product owner only looking at tactical, you miss the connection between the vision and the day-to-day work. This gets you into the aforementioned danger of having the product person be too tactical. When you try to advance on the career ladder, the product owner will not have the experience with strategy that is needed to be effective. I believe it’s best, as an industry, that we forgo product owner as a title and call everyone in this position a product manager so that there is a consistent and meaningful career path.

The director of product is the first level of people management. They oversee a group of product managers who are aligned around a product in a portfolio or product line. The director of product is responsible for the strategic roadmap of the product, usually looking at a time horizon of a year. They are also responsible for the operational effectiveness of the team, making sure all product managers are aligned by the appropriate goals and working on the most important items to move the product forward.

A value stream is all of the activities needed to deliver value to the customer. That includes the processes, from discovering the problem, setting the goals, and conceiving of the idea, to delivering the actual product or service.

Good strategy isn’t a detailed plan. It’s a framework that helps you 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.

Autonomy is what allows organizations to scale. The alternative is hiring hundreds or thousands of middle managers that lead by authority, telling people what to do. As organizations grow to the thousands — or even tens of thousands — of employees, this becomes incredibly inefficient and costly. It also causes unnecessary layers in management and a lot of frustration. People end up unhappy, and unhappy people rarely produce great work.

A good company strategy should be made up of two parts: the operational framework, or how to keep the day-to-day activities of a company moving; and the strategic framework, or how the company realizes the vision through product and service development in the market.

Strategies are interconnecting stories told throughout the organization that explain the objective and outcomes, tailored to a specific time frame. We call this act of communicating and aligning those narratives strategy deployment.

Strategy deployment is about setting the right level of goals and objectives throughout the organization to narrow the playing field so that teams can act. So, while executives might be looking at a five-year strategy, middle management is thinking in smaller strategies — yearly or quarterly — bounding the teams in a direction that allows them to make decisions on a monthly or weekly basis.

Product managers are in charge of making sure the product initiatives and options are aligned with the vision of an existing product or portfolio.

Leaders always complain that they don’t have time to innovate. Usually, this is due to poor capacity planning and strategy creation. 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.

“Don’t spend your time overdesigning and creating unique, innovative solutions for things that are not core to your value proposition. If someone has already solved that problem with a best practice, learn from that, implement their solutions, gather data to determine if it’s successful in your situation, and then iterate. Reserve your time and energy for the things that will make or break your value proposition.”

The most important piece of the MVP is the learning, which is why my definition has always been “the minimum amount of effort to learn.” This keeps us anchored on outcomes rather than outputs.

During quarterly business review meetings, the senior leadership team, made up of the executives and the highest level of the organization, should be discussing progress toward the strategic intents and outcomes of a financial nature.

The product initiative review is another quarterly meeting that can be staggered with the quarterly business review on off months. This meeting is for the product development side of the house — CPO, CTO, design leaders, the VPs of product, and the product managers. Here we review the progress of the options against the product initiatives and adjust our strategy accordingly. This is the place for product managers to talk about the results of preliminary experimentation, research, or first releases, as they relate to overall goals.

Release reviews provide the opportunity for teams to show off the hard work they have done and to talk about success metrics. These should happen monthly, before features go out, to showcase what is in the pipeline to be released.

Many companies talk about how they want their people to be innovative and how they want to create crazy new products, but there has to be an understanding that it’s safe to fail in order to get innovation. When you don’t have safety built in to your company, your product managers won’t feel comfortable trying something new. No one will.

The purpose of a product manager is to create value for the business by creating value for the customer.