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

by Melissa Perri

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.

Release reviews provide the opportunity for teams to show off the hard work they have done and to talk about success metrics.

Instead of thinking of roadmaps as a Gantt chart, you should view them as an explanation of strategy and the current stage of your product.

C. Todd Lombardo and Bruce McCarthy’s book, Product Roadmaps Relaunched.

Experiment This phase is to understand the problem and to determine whether it’s worth solving.

Alpha This phase is to determine whether the solution is desirable to the customers.

Beta This phase is to determine whether the solution is scalable, from a technical standpoint.

Generally Available (GA) This phase means that the solution is widely available to all of our clients.

The biggest issue I see with companies trying to transition to becoming product-led is that they don’t evaluate their current reward structures to make sure they incentivize the right behavior.

Taking 10 years to fail, slowly burning through cash and never getting anywhere, is more problematic than allowing for smaller failures along the way.

if you adopt a great product mindset and you give people the freedom to fail, what you’re doing is allowing them to fail quickly, quietly, and at a lower cost because they’re testing things early. That’s the type of failure you want to encourage.

Product-led companies invest in and budget for work based on their portfolio distribution and the stage of their work.

all budgeting should be tied to getting a product to the next stage.

In addition to a culture that rewards and promotes learning, you need a culture that focuses on the customer.

Jeff Bezos quotes about how Amazon succeeds is, “The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth’s most customer-centric company.”

This is the core of what it means to be customer-centric — to put yourself into your customers’ shoes and ask, “What would make my customers happy and move our business forward?”

Being customer-centric allows you to figure out what products and services will fulfill that value on the customer side.

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.

You can focus on outcomes over outputs, have the right people in the right roles, follow the motions to create a good strategy deployment process, make sure you have the right structure and policies, and still not escape the build trap.

Who came up with the last feature or product idea you built?

What was the last product you decided to kill?

When’s the last time you talked with your customers?

What is your goal?

What are you currently working on?

What are your product managers like?