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.

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.

once worked with a company that made a data platform for enterprise companies. It had a total of 30 features, with about 40 more on the backlog, when I came in. When I measured the customer use of those existing features, we discovered people used only 2% of them consistently. And yet, development was underway to add more, instead of trying to reevaluate what they already had.

The company also overpromised during the sales process, giving customers whatever it took to get the contract signed.

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. Service-based organizations are design agencies that create logos or brands for businesses, or they could be accounting companies where an accountant does your taxes.

Projects are an essential part of product development, but the mentality of thinking only in projects will cause damage.

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.

learned that if I made them really detailed, the engineers wouldn’t need to talk to me.

“Start listening to your team. Involve them. Listen to your customers and focus on their problems instead of your own solutions. Fall in love with those problems. Also, go seek out data to prove and validate your ideas. Turn to concrete evidence, rather than opinions.”

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.

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.