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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. That’s the type of failure from which we can recover.
If you are a manager, be open to the possibility that new ways of working are also beneficial
if you are an executive, think about how you can create safe spaces for people to learn.
Because these budgets are done on a yearly basis, it also really kills the team’s ability to change course at all throughout the year. The organization is preventing itself from rapidly learning and iterating. It’s far wiser to look at funding product development like a venture capitalist (VC).
Product-led companies invest in and budget for work based on their portfolio distribution and the stage of their work. This means allocating the appropriate funds across product lines for things that are known knowns and ready to be built, and it means setting aside money to invest in discovering new opportunities that will propel your business model forward. They then allocate more and more funds to grow the opportunities as they become validated.
Not all investments start off tiny. Depending on the opportunity and how much data you have, you might initially want to fuel it with more funds. But the idea is that all budgeting should be tied to getting a product to the next stage. It’s an effective way to both focus the teams and make sure you’re not overspending.
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. That’s because escaping it is not just about following the motions — it’s about an entire organizational change.
Marquetly was successful because it had a leader who understood that change started with him. Chris knew that, if he did not adopt the outcome-oriented mindset, the customer centricity, and the comfort with uncertainty, no one else in his organization would. “How can I possibly expect the rest of my organization to change, if I am not willing to?”
One of the biggest mistakes that companies make in these transitions is having leadership think that it’s everyone else’s job to change instead of theirs.
Getting out of the build trap is possible, but it takes time and effort. It’s not something that you can easily achieve in a year. It requires not only changing how you work but also how you think as an organization. It needs the participation of everyone in the organization,
The truth is that most organizations out there are not product-led. And yet, being product-led is a winning strategy.
If you look at some of the best companies out there today — Amazon, Netflix, and Google, for example — they are not reactively building whatever customer request comes their way. They are not following Agile processes blindly to build whatever features they can, as fast as they can. Instead, they are developing products with the intent to deliver value to their customers.
