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

by Melissa Perri

Having a metrics platform implemented, whether it’s homegrown or third party, is essential for a product-led company because it enables product managers to make well-informed decisions.

Product managers are often spoken about as the “voice of the customer,” yet too many of us are not getting out and talking to customers as much as we should. Why? Because it involves talking to (gasp) people

it’s essential that we all go talk to actual humans to get to the heart of their problems. In fact, Giff Constable wrote an entire book, called Talking to Humans, that can walk you through how to do just that.

When conducting problem-based research, you are trying to identify the pain point and the root cause of the problem. When you understand the context around a customer’s problem, you can form a better solution to solve it. Without that, you are just guessing.

Kill the bad ideas before they take up too much time and energy from the teams and before you get hooked on them. Instead, fall in love with the problem you are solving.

it’s not the customer’s job to solve their own problems. It’s your job to ask them the right questions.

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.

When we use an MVP only to get a feature out quicker, we’re usually cutting corners on a great experience in the process. Thus, we sacrifice the amount we can learn from it.

A North Star document explains the product in a way that can be visualized by the entire team and company. This includes the problem it is solving, the proposed solution, the solution factors that matter for success, and the outcomes the product will result in.

In his book, The Principles of Product Development Flow, Don Reinertsen talks about the importance of Cost of Delay in prioritizing work. He calls it “the one thing” that should be quantified. Cost of Delay is a numeric value that describes the impact of time on the outcomes you hope to achieve. It combines urgency and value so that you can measure impact and prioritize what you should be doing first.

If you wait too long because you overscoped the release, you lose the money you could have been making. Worse, a competitor could swoop in and steal your market. Then you’d have a higher threshold to entry, and your product will need to be light years better than the competition’s. On the flip side, you don’t want to release something that is terrible and provides minimal benefit to the user in order to get it out early. Then you could lose early adopters, and it’s difficult to win someone back after they’ve had a terrible experience.

We are done developing or iterating on a feature only when it has reached its goals.

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.

Instead of thinking of roadmaps as a Gantt chart, you should view them as an explanation of strategy and the current stage of your product.

Tying livelihoods to the fact that you shipped product at all, instead of learning or solving problems for customers, is what gets people into the build trap.

You should be rewarding people for moving the business forward—achieving outcomes, learning about your users, and finding the right business opportunities.

This is what it means to be customer centric: knowing that the most important thing you can do to create great products is to deeply understand your customers.

Experimenting with my team taught me the power of data. Data beats any opinion every time.

you need to deeply understand what motivates people and to know how you can address their personal motivations by introducing information and data that wins them over.

the fundamental criterion for building a product is that the product solves a problem for a user.

It’s a huge red flag when a team not only can’t take ownership for what it is building, but can’t even tell me why it is building it. This means that the originator of the idea never connected the why to the what

Without a healthy dialogue between a company and its customers, there is no way to truly learn about what the customers want or need. An organization set up for success not only allows product managers to talk to customers, it encourages them to do so and recognizes this process as a huge part of the job.

poor product management at the organizational level. If the product manager does have a goal but it is more output centric than outcome focused, this also signifies an unhealthy product team. An output-centric team measures success in terms of meeting product shipment deadlines. It pays little attention to what these products are actually doing for its business.

The purpose of a product manager is to create value for the business by creating value for the customer.

A truly successful product manager talks more passionately about the problems the product development team is solving than the solutions they are shipping.

A good product manager knows that getting buy-in from the whole team is crucial.

The dream organization for product people is one that sees product managers as leaders who help shape the direction of the company and the services they provide to their customers.