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

by Melissa Perri

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.

Product management is the domain of recognizing and investigating the known unknowns and of reducing the universe around the unknown unknowns. Anyone can run with solutions based on known knowns. Those facts are readily available. But it takes a certain skill to be able to sift through the massive amounts of information and to identify the right questions to ask and when to ask them.

Open up this role to people making the switch into product management, either straight out of school or from another career. Pair them with a senior product manager to teach them the ropes. Give them all the coaching they need. We create the senior people we need by giving junior people a chance.

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

Strategy is a deployable decision-making framework, enabling action to achieve desired outcomes, constrained by current capabilities, coherently aligned to the existing context. A good strategy should transcend the iterations of features, focusing more on the higher-level goals and vision. A good strategy should sustain an organization for years. If you are changing strategy yearly or monthly, without good reason from data or the market, you are treating your strategy as a plan rather than as a framework.

If your vision has been murky for a while, you need to provide more than just a vision statement. Company leaders need to spend time communicating their vision, explaining their choices, and painting an image of what is to come. This doesn’t mean that you need to get super-detailed about how this all manifests. It just means that you must tell a story. When that story is told, you can remind everyone through the simple vision statement.

Companies often confuse the building to learn and building to earn. Experimentation is all about building to learn. It allows you to understand your customers better and to prove whether there is value in solving a problem.

Visibility in organizations is absolutely key. The more leaders can understand where teams are, the more they will step back and let the teams execute.

Roadmaps are not one-size-fits-all. You need to communicate them differently, depending on whether you are talking internally to your team about uncertainty or to the sales team about features that it can communicate to customers. You should design your communication to match your audience.