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

The book has a plethora of great advice for anyone working in Product. However, the amount of generalisations leads to erroneous information at times, and information that is based on the author's views, but making it seems as a definition of what Product Management is, and what it stands for.

By this point, mentioning the "top companies today" (Amazon included), is rather cliché and has been analyzed and nitpicked in so many books that it almost becomes old to rephrase what and how they did things right. There are so many companies across the globe that are building successful products and services. Raving about farming technology and how this specific company has succeeded with their products is all fine, but leaves out the shameful practises the very same PMs had to entrench their customers (the farmers) on their right to repair, causing lawsuits on the aforementioned farming equipment. Hindsight is 20/20, and a PMs decisions and practises may seem profitable and worthy to mention in a book, but may have terrible publicity and cause customer dissatisfaction down the line. Maybe spend some time explaining how these decisions also alienated their users? How has Amazons 'Prime' impacted the competition, and perhaps find competitors that are finding alternative paths to compete in the ecomm space? There's lot of insight that the author could have given - her views and tips for 'those' companies that are constantly one-upping their competition, and how the PMs in these companies can improve their work to create socially and morally healthy products that the audience 'wants'.

While I enjoyed reading this book, I also found many rephrased concepts that the author has left out referencing and citations for. But overall, worth a read for anyone stepping into the product world.

I first encountered Melissa Perri when I joined a workshop on mobile UX at Agile 2015 that she was co-facilitating. I didn’t realize how little I knew about UX design until that workshop! Not long afterwards, I first heard her give a keynote on the Build Trap. Maybe other people were talking about focusing on outcomes rather than outputs, but I first heard it from Melissa. All of that prodded me to approach the designers on my own software delivery team and learn more by working with them. I changed my approach to testing. I started thinking about “How is this valuable to the customer” rather than “OK, the product owner wants this feature, how will I test it”.

This book is about creating an effective product management organization. However, it is valuable to every team member, not only the product manager. Each of us should be thinking about what problems customers want to solve and how we can deliver chunks of that value frequently and sustainably. As a tester, I feel I have a lot to learn from the “great project manager” that Melissa describes in this book - able to collaborate with business stakeholders, technical team members, and designers. The kinds of questions that great product managers ask, as described here, inspire me to ask better questions from a testing perspective.

Techniques like the Product Kata are practical ways for teams to build a vision through continual learning and involving everyone in the organization. When we’re heads down in the trenches developing software, it’s easy to lose track of what’s valuable to the business and customers. The real-life examples here, with hypotheses supported by ways to measure progress, let readers see how we can apply these on our own teams.

The techniques for solution exploration are such effective ways to guide software development with business-facing tests and experiments. I’m lucky to have seen experiments like this succeed “in the wild”. No matter what your role on a team, particularly an agile team, the insights in this book will help you do a better job of getting value to your customer frequently.

Simply put, this book gets to the heart of Product Management today. Melissa tackles this head on. She does so succinctly and effortlessly.

First, Melissa sets the table with one of the most common problems facing folks in corporate America today: The "Build Trap" (output over outcomes). This is something the broader corporate world faces, not just firms operating in the of digital space.

From there she moves to covering Product Management as a leading role in firms. She covers the bad, the great, and offers some thoughts on career paths. What I specifically appreciated was highlighting the fact that a great product manager does not have to have a large staff or even a staff at all. A great Product Manager influences, questions, experiments, and even questions the analysis of results.

Melissa gives a nice overview of how one connects Product Vision through to execution and how Product Management helps lead this. In many organizations, we find PMOs or tech leaders dividing up these into "phases" or assigning them to silos. Melissa dispenses with that and leaves the ownership where it belongs: a Product Management organization that helps lead the teams in the right direction (that direction being the customer).

She follows this up with some tips for how to approach Problem and Solutions exploration. Her thoughts and examples on using a Product Kata (adapted from Mike Rother's work) is helpful and can easily help focus a team on how to get to effective solutions more crisply.

Finally, her overview of what a good Product Management Organization looks like cuts to the chase. It's a very solid overview of what "good" looks like. It's not a nirvana state to never be attained, but a realistic view into where companies can get to.

As a practicing Agilist, I appreciated this book since it is not an encyclopedia of Product Management, but rather it is a great overview of it. No author can solve your problem with their pre-baked solution. However, Melissa does not try to do that in her book. She provides a framework and mindset that helps people to consider ways to solve their own problems. This book is one that I can readily hand out to help start conversations, spark discussions, and paint a picture of where we need to go. Also it will help to align my fellow coaches, tech leaders, and product leaders AWAY from the Build Trap and towards real value delivery.

This book published in 2018 and rereleased in 2019 introduces people working in a corporate setting to the concept of Product Management (PdM). Unlike Project or Program Management which focus on timelines, budgets, and scope (among many, many other things); a PdM ideally acts as a middle manager that remains committed to a specific product and ensures this product is meeting user needs (read heavy user engagement) while at the same time doing its part to execute company strategy (read fulfilling stakeholder and higher-level management needs). This can be a challenging role to fill since it relies upon engaging various audiences on a consistent basis and building good relationships with not only customers but also developers or whomever actually carries out the work. Thus, the "build trap" which constitutes this work's title is a company whose products are launched, upgraded, etc. with little input from or knowledge about their consumers but where providing "outputs" is a metric of success, not meeting customer needs. Of course, it takes work to truly understand customer needs - both those which are and are not being met. This is where the PdM and PdM as a function come in to play.

This book's author, Melissa Perri, does a good job introducing a general audience to PdM in a manner that will appeal to senior managers as well as clients and actual software developers or whomever provides clients service. Unfortunately, she provides a view of PdM that essentially replaces Program Management which I think is well outside the scope of her own definition of PdM. Tying customer needs to strategy and ensuring the results are successfully communicated to developers is a lot to take on. Implementing projects to improve one or a host of products in some manner is a lot to ask an already busy PdM. Furthermore, developing groupings of products or services to meet client needs to include winning new business does involved PdM feedback since they are a vital member of the team, but is better handled by Program Managers whose expertise is focused on such activities. I am a big proponent of and believer in PdM, but I also think Project and Program Management still have important roles to fill in companies which are outside the scope of a PdM's responsibilities.

With that said, I do recommend this book to anyone working in a civilian corporation or government agency. While the products civilian corporations produce are often easy to see and range from consulting services to the mobile phone in your pocket, government agencies can equally use PdMs to improve their service delivery. In the government context, "clients" will range quite widely but they are there nonetheless. For example, the Department of Defense and other parts of the Federal and State Governments consume products from the intelligence community constantly. Who is making sure these are the products they need and, even if they are, if they are meeting client needs as well as possible? Have benefit related organization like the Social Security Administration designated dedicated PdMs to ensure the correct benefits are being accessed by their intended "clients" effectively and meeting the needs for which they are intended? One could cite a myriad of other examples, but I think these two provide a pretty representative picture and show why this book is a great read inside and outside of government circles.

This book is a must read for anyone in product. The principals and examples in the book are applicable for so many companies today.

This book really helps companies and individuals achieve a outcome based product mindset. Many companies are stuck in the output or build trap it is when we work towards actual outcomes is where the magic happens as this book explains..

This will be a go to in my library.

Team leaders, product managers or anyone looking to adopt more product and customer centric ways of work should read this book. It provides a more practical and actionable guide toward product development in an agile context than other text’s I have read. The insight in this book is comprehensive talking about both the processes and practices as well as role descriptions which are most helpful.

The Build Trap the author refers to describes situations where companies become stuck measuring their success by outputs rather than outcomes. This view is important, particularly in software development where the focus has been on shipping things, more than the results created by those things.

The book draws on the author’s experience working with mid sized tech companies. Much of that advice goes something like this, company A had a problem, I came in, the problem was X, we solved it. That simplistic form of case study is the reason this is not a five star book. We do not get a chance to see or experience the struggles of others — struggles we will face adopting the advice in this book.

The book has the frameworks, approaches and structure to help one institutionalize these practices. It is also short and focused, not a text book.

Recommended for anyone looking to move toward more product, customer and outcome centric work.

Great book that any product manager should read. As software developer lead I am really interested on how to help changing the org I work for to a product led org. The book provides guidance on how to do that and it is very much inline with what is occurring in the marketplace. Read, learn or be left behind your choice.

Escaping the Build Trap is one of the books I wish I'd read at the start of my product management career. See all my sticky notes in this volume? This is a book I re-read within weeks of finishing it and that I'll be re-reading many more times.

This crisply written work covers the most common product management pitfalls, gives a tight introduction to some of the key frameworks, provides structure for your PM career at different levels and provides a blueprint for transforming an organization to be product-led.

easy read in the way the chapters are broken down. lots of great, inspiring, actionable ideas/concepts.

Melissa's book is mandatory reading for my team of product managers. With the right mix of theory and great actionable example on how a product-led company can succeed in today's digital economy, this is a must read for aspiring, experienced and leading product managers.