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September 12 - September 30, 2020
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.
Companies can get out of the build trap by setting themselves up to develop intentional and robust product management practices.
“It’s not just about the skills of your product managers,”
“A lot of it is due to having too many priorities. Everything is number one on your project list. You are peanut-buttering your strategy — meaning that you have so many strategic initiatives spread over very few people.
You have to become product-led. That involves shifting the entire mentality of the organization from delivering to achieving outcomes.
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.
When we lose sight of what is important, when we forget what value means, the products we produce — and sometimes our companies themselves — fail.
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.
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 —
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.
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.
Products, as I said before, are vehicles of value. They deliver value repeatedly to customers and users, without requiring the company to build something new every time.
Services, unlike products, use human labor to primarily deliver value to the user.
A project is a discrete scope of work that has a particular aim.
Companies that optimize their products to achieve value are called product-led organizations. These organizations are characterized by product-driven growth, scaling their organization through software products, and optimizing them until they reach the desired outcomes.
Product-led companies understand that the success of their products is the primary driver of growth and value for their company. They prioritize, organize, and strategize around product success.
Sales-led companies let their contracts define their product strategy.
Product strategy connects the business, market, and technology together so that they are all working in harmony.
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.
Product development is full of uncertainty.
known knowns. These are facts that you gather from data or critical requirements from customers.
Known unknowns are clarified enough that you know which question to ask.
Unknown knowns are those moments when you say, “I feel like this is the right thing to do.” This is intuition from years of experience.
The unknown unknowns are the things that you don’t know you don’t know.
Product management is the domain of recognizing and investigating the known unknowns and of reducing the universe around the unknown unknowns.
Product managers are the key to becoming product-led.
Product management is a career, not just a role you play on a team.
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 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.
One of the biggest mistakes companies make in hiring a product manager is trying to find either a technical or market expert.
A product manager must be tech literate, not tech fluent.
“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,”
Without this background in product management, someone can effectively go through the motions of the product owner role in Scrum, but they can never be successful in making sure that they are building the right thing. In other words, product owner is a role you play on a Scrum team. Product manager is a career.
Most organizations do not give their people the necessary time to do product vision and research work.
Tactical work for a product manager focuses on the shorter-term actions of building features and getting them out the door.
Strategic work is about positioning the product and the company to win in the market and achieve goals.
Operational work is about tying the strategy back to the tactical work.
product management is not something you can learn in a two-day course, as so many Agile consultancies would like you to believe. You need to develop the skill set through experience and practice,
The product manager works with a development team and UX designers to ideate and build the right solutions for the customers.
Product managers are usually responsible for a feature or a set of features that are part of a larger packaged product.
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.
it’s imperative to push back as much project management effort as possible to the team and trust them to deliver.
They report to a director of product or, at a smaller company, a VP of product.
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.
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.
A senior product manager is responsible for the same things as a product manager, but they oversee more scope or a more complex product.
Senior product managers are critical to the success of companies of all sizes because they can operate more independently than many product managers.
A director of product becomes necessary to help promote strategic alignment and operational efficiency, connecting their product group back to the product or portfolio vision.
The director of product is responsible for the strategic roadmap of the product, usually looking at a time horizon of a year.
