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January 5 - January 14, 2022
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.
They were handicapped by poor planning and poor strategy.
You can’t give one team a large objective and expect them to hit major goals in a month. Those things take time and manpower. You have to build up to them.”
The problem wasn’t that it did not have a great idea or a great product but that the company itself was not set up to keep growing that product to succeed. The organization was missing the roles, strategy, process, and policies needed to really promote and sustain real value creation.
Everyone is so focused on shipping more software that they lose sight of what is important: producing value for customers, hitting business goals, and innovating against competitors.
The customer realizes value only when these problems are resolved and these wants and needs are fulfilled. Then, and only then, do they provide value back to the business,
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.
The company also overpromised during the sales process, giving customers whatever it took to get the contract signed. The result was a ton of one-off features that satisfied the needs of only one client, rather than a strategic choice to build what would scale for many clients.
When these constraints squeeze too tight, value is sacrificed on both sides of the system.
Outputs are easily quantified things that we produce — number of products or features, number of releases, or velocity of development teams. Outcomes are the things that result when we finally deliver those features and the customer problems are solved. True value is realized in these outcomes, both for the business and for the user or customer.
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.
Product-led companies understand that the success of their products is the primary driver of growth and value for their company. They prioritize, organize, and strategize around product success.
Sales-led companies let their contracts define their product strategy.
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.
Product management is the domain of recognizing and investigating the known unknowns and of reducing the universe around the unknown unknowns.
Most organizations do not give their people the necessary time to do product vision and research work. They would rather hold them responsible for a steady stream of outputs and measure success based on stacking backlogs and writing stories.
Tactical work for a product manager focuses on the shorter-term actions of building features and getting them out the door.
Strategic work is about positioning the product and the company to win in the market and achieve goals.
Operational work is about tying the strategy back to the tactical work.
The product manager works with a development team and UX designers to ideate and build the right solutions for the customers.
A senior product manager is responsible for the same things as a product manager, but they oversee more scope or a more complex product.
A director of product is usually found only at larger companies and is a critical role for scaling.
Next is a VP of product. Someone in this role oversees the strategy and operations for an entire product line.
A CPO oversees a company’s entire product portfolio. This is the highest role of a product manager, and it represents a seat at the executive table of a company.
Companies tend to organize in three main ways: value streams, features, and technical components.
A value stream is all of the activities needed to deliver value to the customer. That includes the processes, from discovering the problem, setting the goals, and conceiving of the idea, to delivering the actual product or service.
When organizations lack a coherent product strategy that is ruthlessly prioritized around a few key goals, they end up spreading themselves thin.
to make a considerable impact, you need to have everyone going in the same direction, working toward the same goals,
A good strategy is not a plan; it’s a framework that helps you make decisions.
Strategy creation is the process of determining the direction of the company and developing the framework in which people make decisions.
When we’re developing software, we often think of the details and neglect the big picture. What feature can we build? How do we optimize that feature? When will it be delivered? When a company thinks only about the feature-level model, it loses track of the outcomes those features should produce. That is what lands you in the build trap.
Good strategy isn’t a detailed plan. It’s a framework that helps you make decisions.
Communicating the end state of a product is not inherently wrong. You should be striving toward a vision.
Teams that lock themselves into these plans of action before gathering actual evidence will build useless features that do not matter to their customers.
When organizations do not see the results they want, they try to fill this gap by putting more controls in place. However, that is the worst thing you can do in this scenario.
Upper management is willing to embrace uncertainty about what customers want, and, by doing so, they create a work environment that embraces experimentation and innovation and that can course-correct quickly, when necessary.
Strategy creation is the process of figuring out which direction the company should act upon and of developing the framework in which people make decisions.
The company vision is the linchpin in the strategy architecture. It sets the direction and provides meaning for everything that follows.
A good mission explains why the company exists. A vision, on the other hand, explains where the company is going based on that purpose.
Product initiatives translate the business goals into the problems that we will solve with our product.
Product initiatives set the direction for the product teams to explore options.
Product managers are in charge of making sure the product initiatives and options are aligned with the vision of an existing product or portfolio.
The product vision communicates why you are building something and what the value proposition is for the customer.
Companies with more than one product often wrap their products under what is called a product portfolio.
It’s not that you don’t have time to innovate; it’s that you are not making time to innovate.
The best solutions are linked to real problems that users want solved.
