Escaping the Build Trap Quotes

“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.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Strategy is a deployable decision-making framework, enabling action to achieve desired outcomes, constrained by current capabilities, coherently aligned to the existing context.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“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.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Start listening to your team. Involve them. Listen to your customers and focus on their problems instead of your own solutions. Fall in love with those problems. Also, go seek out data to prove and validate your ideas. Turn to concrete evidence, rather than opinions.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Esto necesita cambiar por completo la mentalidad de la empresa, de hacer entregas a conseguir resultados.”
― Melissa Perri, Escapa de la Trampa del Desarrollo: Cómo crear valor real con una gestión efectiva del producto

“Every industry and product has unknowns — getting creative about how you answer these unknowns is key.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“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.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Product management is a career, not just a role you play on a team. The product manager deeply understands both the business and the customer to identify the right opportunities to produce value. They are responsible for synthesizing multiple pieces of data, including user analytics, customer feedback, market research, and stakeholder opinions, and then determining in which direction the team should move. They keep the team focused on the why — why are we building this product, and what outcome will it produce?”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“What are your product managers like?”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“What are you currently working on?”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“What is your goal?”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“When’s the last time you talked with your customers?”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“What was the last product you decided to kill?”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Who came up with the last feature or product idea you built?”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Consulting also taught me that one of the quickest ways to kill the spirit of a great employee is to put them in an environment where they can’t succeed. That’s when most people leave.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“the product roadmap should be updated constantly, especially at the team levels. This is why, at Produx Labs, we call them Living Roadmaps.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“There are many ways to experiment to learn. Concierge, Wizard of Oz, and concept testing are three examples of solution experiments, each of which I explain shortly.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Companies often confuse the building to learn and building to earn.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Giff Constable wrote an entire book, called Talking to Humans, that can walk you through how to do just that.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“After we have set the goal, we begin walking through the Product Kata. We ask ourselves the following: What is the goal? Where are we now in relation to that goal? What is the biggest problem or obstacle standing in the way of me reaching that goal? How do I try to solve that problem? What do I expect to happen (hypothesis)? What actually happened, and what did we learn?”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Acquire more individual users. Retain existing individual users better. Create new revenue streams for existing individual users.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Marquetly realized that, in order to grow its revenue to the numbers it needed, it should focus on expanding upmarket, selling to larger companies (enterprises),”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Here are a few examples of compelling vision statements: To offer designer eyewear at a revolutionary price, while leading the way for socially conscious businesses. Warby Parker At Bank of America, we are guided by a common purpose to help make financial lives better by connecting clients and communities to the resources they need to be successful. Bank of America Becoming the best global entertainment distribution service, licensing entertainment content around the world, creating markets that are accessible to film makers, and helping content creators around the world to find a global audience. Netflix”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Then I went to my peers in the leadership team and asked them what was the most important thing we could do as a company,” continued Jen. “They all gave me different answers. It’s pretty clear we’re not aligned on what our strategy is or what we want to become as a company.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“If you do not already have a strategy in place, I want to stress that this is not a one-day or one-week process. I have seen companies try to cram the creation of a strategy into that time frame and fail. This is something that takes time and focus to craft and maintain.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Don’t spend your time overdesigning and creating unique, innovative solutions for things that are not core to your value proposition.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“fall in love with the problem you are solving.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“Problem-based user research is generative research, meaning that its purpose is to find the problem you want to solve.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“HEART metrics measure happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success. These are usually used to talk about a specific product or feature.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

“why are we building this product, and what outcome will it produce?”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value