Escaping the Build Trap: summary, highlights, and my reviews
Escaping The Build Trap book provides a good approach to effective product management!
As someone who isn’t entirely new to product/project management, I still consider myself very-green to this area when it comes to embracing a product-led mindset since I’m eager to learn more about it.
Admittedly, I did not have any expectations initially. However, I had heard so much about it from podcasts, Twitter, social media, and so on. I was simply expecting to find answers to “How should product/project management actually be?”. Admittedly, it was more than that!
Part 1: The Build Trap
The book defines what a Build Trap is and explains it to anyone working in a Product Management role. It outlines how to escape the build trap in subsequent chapters and delves into the details of building a product management organization that can achieve maximum business and customer value.
The Value Exchange System
Companies must understand the value. They need to deeply understand the problem and the customer, and measure the value effectively.
Value is not equal to the quantity of features; it is all about how people use them.
Constraints on the Value System
To get maximum value, companies should apply the right processes, strategies, and culture. Success is not just about bug-free code or finishing before the deadline. Companies should focus on solving problems instead of prioritizing the number of features, velocity, or releases. It is important to define and measure both the outcome and the value.
Outcomes are more important than outputs.
Projects vs. Products vs. Services
In this part, the author defines the project, product, and service, but I’d be nice to see more concrete examples.
Product-driven organizations scale with products until they reach their desired outcomes.
The Product-led Organization
This chapter defines different types of organizations:
- Product-led
- Sales-led
- Technology-led
- Visionary-led
The author says that this book focuses on product-led strategies and processes, which are important for understanding product success and achieving growth and value.
What We Know and What We Don’t
In this chapter, the author explains the Known-Unknown Matrix: known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns. Essentially, the matrix helps to determine what actions to take in certain situations. However, I expected more concrete examples from real-world experiences.
Part 2: The Role of the Product Manager
When I read the title, I expected a deeper understanding of the role of the product manager, but instead, the author tells a real-world story in this section. The book splits this topic into two sections: “Bad” and “Great”.
Bad Product Manager Archetypes
The role of a Product Manager is not typically taught in college. The book describes how Junior Product Managers learn in a tactile manner, including tasks such as planning, writing user stories, and participating in check-in meetings. A strategic mindset is critical for success in this role.
The definition of the Product Death Cycle emphasizes the importance of not implementing random ideas without validation, as this creates a death loop of building missing features that no one uses. To avoid this, product managers should not act as mini-CEOs or waiters who simply asks to internal stakeholders: “What do you want?”, without a clear goal, vision, or decision-making. Instead, they should deeply focus on the problems and determine the best solution.
Focus on the “Why?” instead of the “When?” and pushing back when necessary is essential.
A Great Product Manager
Throughout this chapter, the author tells a story, and I tried to identify some key points:
- Start by asking “Why?” to define the product’s purpose
- Define the backlog and prioritize tasks based on the product’s goals
- Ensure that completed user stories fulfill the necessary criteria
- Dive into individual user needs and measure the data.
- Understand how UX impacts the product’s value.
- Prioritize work and define outcome-oriented goals while discovering the real customer and business value.
- Eliminate uncertainties and unanswered questions to create a successful product.
- Understand the problem and focus on sustainable solutions.
- Do one thing at a time and validate the direction before moving forward.
- Create a Product Management Foundation within the company to establish a solid product management framework.
The Product Manager Career Path
The author emphasizes the importance of well-defined responsibilities and levels as a company grows. She explains the product roles under three different groups:
- Tactical: focus on short-term actions and determine what to do next
- Strategic: positioning the product and company to win in the market and achieve goals
- Operational: create roadmaps, connect the current state to future state, and align teams
The chapter also defines the typical product management career paths and responsibilities under six titles. Additionally, it provides a wider overview of how a PM can evolve from a tactical to a strategic role as they grow in their career.
Organizing Your Teams
The author benchmarks the organizational structure of her former company to express their comments. She argue that:
“Without a Product Organization, it promotes an output-oriented mindset.”
She stress the importance of learning to say “No” and to stop developing unnecessary features.
- Teams should balance coverage and scope to achieve efficiency.
- Intense collaboration can improve coordination on important initiatives and eliminate unnecessary work, resulting in greater efficiency and reduced redundancy.
A value stream is needed to deliver value to the customer, and it’s essential to keep the strategy and the value execution together to evaluate the work.
Product vision identifies value streams for building an organizational structure.
PMs need room to manage toward an entire outcome-oriented goal, and people need to be aligned around value to have the scope to actually make a measurable impact toward it. It’s essential to make a considerable impact and ensure that everyone is going in the same direction.
Part 3: Strategy
The chapter emphasizes the importance of having a clear and concise strategy that is communicated throughout the organization. Author tells Netflix’s strategy to become a leading-platform from old DVD times to WWW.
A good strategy defines what the company is going to do and what it’s not going to do with decision-making framework. Combination of vision, goals and key initiatives helps to make decisions. Enforce a coherent and aligned mentality to enable decision-making and achieve the right outcomes, resulting in a strong strategic focus.
Avoid the build trap by focusing on the big-picture rather than getting lost in feature-level details.
What is Strategy?
Strategy is a deployable decision-making framework that enables actions to achieve desired outcomes, constrained by current capabilities and coherently aligned to the existing context.
It helps to create alignment and ensure that everyone in the organization is moving in the same direction. Sustain the organization with good strategy. Good strategy isn’t a detailed plan. Changing the strategy frequently could turn it into a plan rather than a framework, which threatens your strategy. Thinking of it as a plan is what gets us into the build trap.
Ask “Is this the right thing to build?” and expect a straight answer, rather than hearing “No idea, my boss told me to build it.”.
Teams that lock themselves into plans of action before gathering actual evidence are likely to build useless features that do not matter to their customers. Adding features without a holistic evaluation raises uncertainty about their relevance to the company’s goals. It is essential to transcend the iterations of features and focus on higher-level goals and vision.
A well-defined strategy helps the company to stay focused, avoid distractions and move faster towards achieving its goals.
Strategic Gaps
- Knowledge gap refers to the difference between what we would like to know and what we actually know.
- Alignment gap refers to the difference between what we want people to do and what they actually do.
- Effects gap refers to the difference between what we expect our actions to achieve and what they actually achieve.
Autonomy is the key to scalability. Having hundreds of authoritative middle managers in large organizations can be inefficient, costly, and lead to unhappy employees and suboptimal work quality.
Organizations can scale effectively by enabling autonomous teams to take action.
Creating a Good Strategic Framework
The author emphasizes the importance of setting clear goals and metrics to measure success:
- Gathering metrics and prioritizing customer feedback is crucial to building valuable products.
- Setting the right level of goals and objectives is about strategy deployment.
Prioritizing work based on what the leadership team thinks is right, rather than on customer feedback, is ineffective.
An Operational Framework (to keep day-to-day activities) and a Strategic Framework (how the company realizes its vision) are required to create a good strategy.
- Strategy deployment can solve issues such as limiting teams that manage by strict guidelines or giving too much freedom, which hinders their ability to take action. To ensure effective alignment of the organization, create strategies at each level and deploy them by determining the direction in which the company should move.
- Effective communication, including a cyclical process of sharing information up, down, and across an organization, is essential for synchronizing management and promoting alignment and understanding at all levels of the organization. By continuously communicating data and direction throughout the organization, alignment can be maintained.
- Teams become stuck when insufficiently constrained. Unconstrained teams are most frightened and scared to act in the organization due to an overwhelming number of options, which can make decision-making difficult.
- The importance of sharing information and continuous learning to inform strategic decisions that enable the organization to achieve its vision. This process, called Information Physics, involves analyzing, testing, and communicating what is learned to peers and management teams.
Not having the right level of direction lands in a build trap.
Company-Level Vision and Strategic Intents
The author provides information about the mission and vision of companies. She exemplifies Netflix and her former company.
- Define your high-level and business-focused strategic intents to reach the vision.
- Determine how the company will contribute to these goals.
Mission is why the company exists, whereas vision is where the company is going.
Product Vision and Portfolio
Product initiative answers the question “How?” and is an important step in setting the direction for product teams to explore and align with the goals of the company.
Product managers are responsible for synchronizing product initiatives with existing products and portfolio options. Companies often group their products under a product portfolio.
Product initiatives are derived from the work required to achieve strategic goals and visions while balancing teams with the company’s direction.
To innovate successfully, it is important for leaders to prioritize innovation by creating strategies and plans that support it, instead of using time as an excuse; innovation may take years.
Part 4: Product Management Process
The author expresses concern about how everyone had an idea, but no one understood “What the problem was?”. She then asks, “What do we know?” based on product metrics and emphasizes the importance of trusting in data and feedback. List your alternative initiatives with options to explore.
Prioritizing software development over building the right software, is known as a build trap.
The Product Kata
The Product Kata is a framework designed by the author, Melissa Perri. She explains what it is and what it is for. It’s about understanding where you are and what is needed before you start working.
- Understanding the direction
- Exploring the problem
- Exploring the solution
- Optimizing the solution
You should not rush to apply it or experiment unnecessarily if the problem is not yet known or if there is already a good solution.
- Focus on solving core problems and don’t waste time on overdesigning solutions for non-core issues.
- Adopt existing best practices, test and iterate for success.
Kill the bad ideas; less is more, and quality is more important than quantity.
Understanding the Direction and Settings Success Metrics
Use data to guide product decisions.
- Define the meaning of metrics.
- Implement your metrics platform.
- Define mutually destructive pair metrics and distinguish between lagging and leading indicators.
- Ensure you have enough data to act on.
- Focus on product metrics instead of output-oriented productivity metrics such as features shipped or user stories complete, to connect product metrics to business outcomes.
- acquisition
- activation
- retention
- referral
- revenue
- happiness
- engagement
- adoption
- retention
- task success
Problem Exploration
The author argues that many product teams jump straight into solution mode without truly understanding the problem they are trying to solve. This can lead to wasted time and resources building the wrong product or building a product that doesn’t meet the needs of the target audience.
To avoid such situations, it is important to listen to the Voice of the Customer through user research, observations, surveys, and customer feedback.
- Generative Research can also be conducted to develop a deeper understanding and gain more awareness of users in order to find opportunities for solutions and innovation.
- Evaluation Research is important for assessing a specific problem to ensure usability and ground it in the wants, needs, and desires of real people.
It is recommended to set success metrics after investigating the problem to ensure that the solution addresses the needs of the target audience effectively.
Solution Exploration
Understand the direction, diagnose the problem, learn more about it, and then determine the right solution. The goal is to receive faster feedback.
- It is important to distinguish between “experimenting to learn” and “building to earn”.
- Being creative in how you address “product unknowns” is crucial.
Prototypes can be utilized when necessary to learn user flows and features. When experimenting, concepts such as the followings can be employed to test the viability of an idea and gather user feedback:
- Concierge Experiment: a team manually provides a service to users as if it were fully automated, to test the viability of the idea and learn from the user feedback.
- Wizard of Oz experiment: users interact with a product that appears to be fully automated, but in reality, the product is being operated by a person behind the scenes.
Building and Optimizing Your Solution
Product-led companies’ culture, policies, and structure must support good product management efforts.
Definition of Done: a checklist of valuable activities required to produce software.
Qualitative Cost of Delay: prioritize what should and should not be done first.
Story Mapping helps teams break down their work and align around goals.
- Start with that big picture.
- Evolve the product vision over time.
- Building understanding as a team helps you develop and get value out to the customer faster. It’s important to make sure everyone understands the context and the work that needs to be done to deliver value.
- Prioritize the work: consider trade-offs between the amount of value you can capture with the scope of the release and the time it takes to get it out the door.
- Reduce the scope enough to capture maximum value.
Do not iterate a feature without measuring the outcomes.
Part 5: The Product-Led Organization
The author discusses the story of Kodak and advises companies to adopt a product-led mindset in both mentality and practice. They should also implement good product management practices with the right roles with the right people to avoid a similar fate. To do so, companies should understand their customers and conduct good research. Additionally, they should sustain good communication, culture, policies, and rewards.
Outcome-Focused Communication
Measuring progress by the number of features shipped is a build trap. Leaders may prioritize features shipped over actual results because it feels satisfying to see progress and accomplish tasks, but it’s important to remember that this is not the only measure of success!
Many companies fail to successfully transition to an outcome-oriented approach due to a lack of leadership support.
Product Operations team is a critical component to distribute the work and to well-run product organization on at scale. It’s dangerous to be a sales-led organization because it can lead to a lack of alignment around strategy.
- Visibility is crucial in organizations because it allows leaders to step back and give teams more autonomy.
- Lack of transparency widens the knowledge gap, leading to demands for more information and restricted exploration.
Most companies have a few core strategic meetings: quarterly business reviews, product initiative reviews, and release reviews. Understand 4 roadmap phases: experiment, alpha, beta, generally available.
Rewards and Incentives
Re-evaluate how you are incentivizing people.
Reward people for moving business forward, achieving outcomes, finding right business opportunities.
Safety and Learning
Learning should be at the core of every product-led organization. If you don’t have safety built in your company, product managers won’t feel comfortable trying something new. Give people the freedom to fail. Create safe spaces for people to learn.
The quickest way 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.
Budgeting
One of the factors that leads to the output-over-outcome mindset in organizations is the way they budget. Budgeting should be tied to getting a product to the next step.
Customer Centricity
“The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer.” — Jeff Bezos.
To create great products:
- Deeply understand your customers
- Focus on outcomes over outputs
- Have the right people in the right roles
- Create a good strategy deployment process
- Have the right structure and policies.
The Last Six Questions to Determine Whether a Company Is Product-Led:
- Who came up with the last feature or product idea you built?
- What was the last product you decided to kill?
- When’s the last time you talked with your customers?
- What is your goal?
- What are you currently working on?
- What are your product managers like?
Conclusion
If you want to be a Product/Project Manager, or you are a Software Engineer working in an Agile mindset, or if you’ve lost your way and don’t know where to start, or are new in this space, this book should be an instant buy for you.
As a Software Engineer, I can clearly say that this book is not just for product managers or those who want to be. Besides, it will definitely contribute to your understanding of product management mindset and process.
Escape the build trap by implementing a customer-centric product management division, supporting them with the right strategy, and then enabling their processes of experimentation with safety and policies that promote learning. By focusing on outcomes instead of outputs, you will be able to achieve them.
Do not just follow Agile practices blindly and build things for the sake of checking boxes; instead, develop products with the intent to deliver value to your customers.
Thank you, Melissa Perri, for such a great book!
