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.

You have to become product-led. That involves shifting the entire mentality of the organization from delivering to achieving outcomes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The product death cycle is a specific form of the build trap. You are implementing ideas without validating them.

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.

Product managers really own the “why” of what they are building. They know the goal at hand and understand which direction the team should be building toward, depending on company strategy. They communicate this direction to the rest of the team.

One of the biggest mistakes companies make in hiring a product manager is trying to find either a technical or market expert. Product managers are not experts in either of these domains; they are experts in product management.

Most organizations do not give their people the necessary time to do product vision and research work. They would rather hold them responsible for a steady stream of outputs and measure success based on stacking backlogs and writing stories.

Product managers ultimately play a few key roles, but one of the most important ones is being able to marry the business goals

In SAFe, product managers are the managers of product owners and are responsible for external-facing interactions and work. They speak to the customers, they define the requirements and scope of the products to be built, and they communicate these down to the product owners. The product owners are internal facing, defining the components of the solution and working with developers to ship it. I’ve trained dozens of teams who are using SAFe, and I have never seen it work well.

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.

If you give a product manager a large Scrum team’s backlog to maintain while you are in discovery mode, they will keep that backlog filled. But they will also be torn between keeping work flowing to the developers and trying to do the work to validate direction. As a result, neither ends up done well.

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. Here is where product managers create a roadmap that connects the current state of the product to the future state and that aligns the teams around the work.

But, as the portfolio or product scales, you need product people to start bringing this knowledge to a wider overview than just the features, to make sure everything is working together as a system. This is why the work starts to shift away from the tactical, as a product manager grows, as you can see in Figure 8-1.

as anyone who has ever tried to hire senior product people knows, there are not many out there on the market. The ones who are available are snapped up quickly.

The product manager needs to be strategic enough to help craft the vision of the features and how they fit into the overall product but tactical enough to ensure a smooth execution of the solution.

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 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.

This is the role for people who like difficult product problems. They want to work on new, innovative products and to chart new territory for the company.

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,

A successful CPO needs to be able to translate their actions into terms the board will understand.”

the best chief product officers also have three key traits that set them apart: they inspire confidence, empathize, and are relentless and resilient.

They were actively working on a technical component that was already in a steady state, where it was optimized and functional. This did not need to be worked on to achieve the company goals, and yet here she was creating work for her team because she had been told it was what she owned and could work on.

When features are stable, we should monitor them but then move on to the more important work needed to support our strategy.

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.

it makes sense to organize your teams around the value stream.

You can’t build an organizational structure without a product vision, because the value streams are not apparent.

Figure 9-1. Final state Marquetly product management organizational chart

Product managers need room to manage toward an entire outcome-oriented goal. This means that people need to be aligned around value and to have the scope to actually make measurable impact toward it.

Hastings realized that if he launched a hardware device, he could not partner with anyone else. He would be in the business of hardware, not software or entertainment.

Instead, Netflix spun off Project Griffin as a separate company, which you know today as Roku. Then it turned its sights to finding a partner with a device for

which they could build an app. They approached Microsoft, and, six months later, Netflix was enabled on more than one million Xbox devices, accomplishing the goal of gaining more streaming customers.

Netflix then self-organized around key outcomes and strategies to help reach its goals.

Table III-1. Gibson Biddle, Netflix strategy, 2007

When a company thinks only about the feature-level model, it loses track of the outcomes those features should produce. That is what lands you in the build trap.

“How can they possibly tell you what they should build if they’re not sure why they are building it? They can’t figure out the right product until they know what problem they are solving.”

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

The Art of Action,

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

The Knowledge Gap (Figure 11-1) is the difference between what management would like to know and what the company actually knows.