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

by Melissa Perri

the build trap. I was so focused on shipping features and developing as many cool ideas (but mostly my own ideas) as I could that I didn’t even think about the outcome of those features.

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.

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.

To be strategic and to have people operate strategically, we need to stop judging teams based on the quantity of features shipped.

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.

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.

Technology is critical to a software company’s success, but it cannot drive the product strategy.

Product strategy connects the business, market, and technology together so that they are all working in harmony.

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.

Known unknowns are clarified enough that you know which question to ask. They are assumptions that you want to test, data points that you can investigate, or problems that you can identify and explore.

Although we should all listen to our intuition, you should also be cautious because this is often where bias thrives. It’s imperative to check and experiment to see whether your intuition is right.

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

Product managers identify features and products that will solve customer problems while achieving business goals.

We rarely teach product managers how to think, and, even if we do, we don’t measure this thinking for success. Instead, we are praised for writing detailed specifications or for making sure the developers are shipping on time.

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.

To be effective team leaders, product managers need to recognize team members’ strengths and to work with them to achieve the common goal.

Product managers connect the dots. They take input from customer research, expert information, market research, business direction, experiment results, and data analysis. Then they sift through and analyze that information, using it to create a product vision that will help to further the company and to solve the customers’ needs.

A product manager must be tech literate, not tech fluent. That means they can discuss enough and understand enough about the technology to talk to developers and to make trade-off decisions. They know the right questions to ask engineers to understand the complexity of certain features or improvements.

A product manager doesn’t need to be able to code unless the product is highly technical and it’s essential they understand the technology deeply to make decisions.

A good product manager is taught how to prioritize work against clear, outcome-oriented goals, to define and discover real customer and business value, and to determine what processes are needed to reduce the uncertainty about the product’s success in the market.

Good product managers are able to figure out how to achieve goals for the business by creating or optimizing products, all with a view toward solving actual customer problems.

With a good strategy framework in place and ruthless prioritization around a few key goals, one person can effectively talk to customers, understand their problems, and help to define the solutions with the team.

Strategic work is about positioning the product and the company to win in the market and achieve goals. It looks at the future state of the product and the company and what it will take to get there.

When they only optimize for the day-to-day execution of the team, they usually fall behind in the strategy and visioning work that is needed for the success of the features.

A successful VP of product needs to fundamentally be more of a strategic person and to know that, in order to scale their organization, they need to hire in people who take over the tactical and operational components.

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

To organize teams effectively, you need to balance the coverage and scope of teams with the goals you are trying to achieve.

if your app, interface, or feature is not inherently adding value on its own, it’s just a piece of the entire product. That doesn’t mean no one needs to manage it. It just means you have to look beyond just that piece to understand how to manage for value delivery and creation.

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

When organizations lack a coherent product strategy that is ruthlessly prioritized around a few key goals, they end up spreading themselves thin.

Gibson Biddle, who was a VP of product at Netflix from 2005 to 2010, talks about aligning his team around a common guideline for evaluating its product strategy. That guideline was to “delight customers, in margin-enhancing, hard-to-copy ways.”

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

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.

When teams are not aligned with a clear direction and goals, they cannot effectively make decisions. If they dare to try, much of the time, the leader steps in and says, “No, that’s not right.”

the best thing a company can do is to combine both the mission and the vision into one statement to provide the value proposition of the company—what the company does, why it does it, and how it wins doing that.

It’s okay to want to be the best or the market leader, but you need to give some context on how.

peanut buttering—spreading themselves thin over many areas of work instead of making a concerted push in one direction.

you need to be careful not to make the product vision too specific. It cannot describe every little feature but should include more of the main capabilities it enables for the user.

“Don’t spend your time overdesigning and creating unique, innovative solutions for things that are not core to your value proposition. If someone has already solved that problem with a best practice, learn from that, implement their solutions, gather data to determine if it’s successful in your situation, and then iterate. Reserve your time and energy for the things that will make or break your value proposition.”

If you can, learn from those who have optimized already, implement their best practices, and tweak from there.

You can easily turn a vanity metric into an actionable metric by adding a time component to it.

users finding your product is acquisition; users having a great first experience is activation; keeping users returning to your product is called retention; users recommending others because they love your product is referral; and, finally, users paying for your product because they see value in it is revenue. Put it all together and you get AARRR—Pirate Metrics.

Activating people well at the beginning leads to retention down the line.

HEART metrics measure happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success

With HEART, you add in other metrics to talk about how the user interacts with the product. Happiness is a measure of how satisfied the user is with the product. Engagement is a measure of how often users interact with the product. Task success measures how easy it is for a user to accomplish what they were meant to with the product.

Whatever your metric, it’s important to have a system of metrics, not just one, to guide product decisions. It’s easy to game one metric when it’s your singular focus.

system of two metrics that balance out each other mutually destructive pairs, although there can be more than just two.

Leading indicators tell us whether we’re on our way to achieving those lagging indicators like retention. To determine the leading indicators for retention, you can qualify what keeps people retained—​for example, happiness and usage of the product.

To make sure you have enough data to act on, it’s important to implement tools that make it easy to measure these things. This is one of the first things every company should do—implement a metrics platform.