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

by Melissa Perri

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. A similar issue happens when teams are organized around specific features. A lot of teams do this to get coverage—ownership over every part of the product. Although this is good if you are literally starting from scratch and do not have a product organization set up, but, over time, it promotes a very output-oriented mindset. Instead of working toward a goal and saying no to anything that doesn’t get us there, we tend to look for ways to develop more things related to our little slice of the product. If we take a step back and align the work of these teams to the overall vision of the product and strategy (which we talk about in the next section), we find that much of that work really shouldn’t have been prioritized. When features are stable, we should monitor them but then move on to the more important work needed to support our strategy.