— Book summary, Product management — 5 min read
The book Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri describes why product development organizations often fail and how a product-led organization should function.
Build trap is a term Perri uses to describe a situation where an organization is stuck measuring success by outputs rather than the business outcomes those outputs result in. Outputs can be features, products or projects the product team delivers, or e.g. the velocity of the development team.
An output-focused company ends up developing features that don't solve customer problems, and that customers are not willing to pay for. In the book, Perri describes how a company can get out of the build trap and become a product-led organization that optimizes for customer value.
Budgeting, strategy work and product roadmaps are done on a yearly basis. The company sees strategy as a plan that lists what steps to take and what features or products to build.
Product managers are measured by how well they are able to deliver the features and products, not by what kind of business outcomes those outputs provide. As the PMs goal is to ship a certain set of features by a certain deadline, the PM is not incentivized to question whether building the features makes sense. With output-focused success metrics, user research is seemingly unproductive as the discovery work just slows down the development work.
As user research is neglected, the teams end up developing features that no one needs or wants, and that don't deliver business outcomes.
The senior management team sees no movement in the business metrics and concludes that the product teams are failing. They come up with new features to build in order to fix the situation, and the product team goes deeper into delivery mode.
Making the switch from an output-focused feature factory to a product-led company requires changes in the way strategy is set and deployed in the product development process.
The company's strategy should answer the following questions:
The list of obstacles to remove should be kept short to make sure the company is focused and aligned. When an obstacle is removed or the operating environment changes, strategy is adjusted to reflect the new situation.
The strategy should form a framework for product leaders and managers to help them decide what to focus on, and what initiatives to take and features to build.
In a product-led organization, product development investments are seen as bets. Thinking of investments as bets acknowledges that investments are risky by nature. The more sure you are of the outcome, the larger bets you can make.
The job of a product manager is to reduce the risks related to these bets by carrying out user research and running smaller experiments before committing to building the full-blown feature or product. Perri introduces a process for continuous development and learning which she calls the Product Kata. It is a version of the Toyota Kata adjusted to software development.
The team selects a goal that is aligned with the strategy, and determines what target metric best describes that goal. To reach the goal, the team repeats a five-step process, the Product Kata, by answering the following questions:
It is noteworthy that the iterations don't necessarily start with building something. In the first cycles, the biggest obstacle might be the lack of product metrics that stops the team from learning, and the step to take would then be to add user tracking to the product. After learning about the user behavior through better product metrics, the team moves on to tackle the next obstacle.
The iterations should be small enough to accomplish in about one week's time.
The Product Kata is the same process that Perri suggests for strategy creation, but applied at a lower organizational level. Product leaders can use it as a coaching tool to help product managers run experiments systematically and efficiently.
One major force keeping companies in the build trap is that stepping out of the trap requires a leap of faith from the whole leadership team. The organization needs to slow down on feature development, go into discovery mode to catch up on user research, and trust the product teams to come up with solutions to the strategic obstacles. For a leadership team used to output focused success metrics, this slowing down of feature development can look like the development teams would be losing momentum. Switching to outcome based success metrics before trying to make the transition is crucial.
The book assumes a buy-in from the leadership team before any change can happen. An interesting question left unanswered is, could a the trasformation be done starting from the bottom, without a strong (initial) buy-in from top-management. To start the transformation from lower tiers of the organization, the product teams would need to push back on the feature wish-lists, and create some room foruser research.
Overall, I think Escaping the Build Trap is the best book I've read about how to build a product-led organization. The strategy section is aligned with what the book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt, and the description of the role of a product manager is pretty much what is described in Inspired by Marty Cagan. Perri manages to bridge the ideas in these different books, bring her own ideas to the mix and give an overview of how a product-led organization should function. Perri has managed to nail down a very real phenomenon affecting many product development organizations.
The definition of a build trap
A build trap is when organizations become stuck measuring their success by outputs rather than outcomes. It's when they focus more on shipping and delivering features rather than on the actual value those things produce.
Outputs vs. Outcomes
Outputs are easily quantifiable things that we produce - number of products or features, number of releases or velocity of the development teams. Outcomes are the things that result when we finally deliver those features and the customer problems are solved
The role of the product manager
The real role of the product manager in the organization is to work with a team to create the right product that balances meeting business needs with solving user problems.
Strategy
Strategy is about how you take the organization from where you currently are and reach the vision. For strategy to be created, you must first understand the vision, or where you want to go. Then we can identify problems or obstacles standing in our way of getting there and experiment around tackling them. We repeatedly do this until we reach the vision.