Business Product Management Technology

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

by Melissa Perri

Your team just launched a huge, complex feature after six months of hard work. The launch is a success—no bugs! But a month later, you check the data: nobody is using it, and the company's revenue hasn't budged. Congratulations, you're in the 'Build Trap'—the silent killer of innovation where companies mistake the act of building for the act of creating value.

Stop Measuring Activity, Start Measuring Value

The build trap thrives on measuring 'outputs' (e.g., features shipped, lines of code written). Effective organizations focus on 'outcomes' (a meaningful change in user behavior) that lead to 'impact' (the resulting business value).

A team's goal was to 'launch a new mobile checkout flow.' That's an output. A better, outcome-oriented goal would be to 'reduce cart abandonment on mobile by 20%.' This frees the team to experiment with multiple solutions—like simplifying the form, adding guest checkout, or offering Apple Pay—to find what actually changes user behavior, instead of being locked into building one specific feature.

Product Managers Are Not Backlog Administrators

Many companies reduce product managers to order-takers who translate stakeholder requests into JIRA tickets. Perri argues their true role is strategic: to understand the business, market, and customer in order to set a vision and guide the team towards valuable outcomes.

Perri describes a company where the PM's main job was to take feature requests from the CEO and sales team, prioritize them based on who yelled the loudest, and feed them to developers. This led to a bloated, incoherent product that didn't solve any core user problem well, trapping them in a cycle of reactive development instead of proactive strategy.

Strategy Is a Framework, Not a Rigid Plan

Rigid, long-term roadmaps filled with a pre-defined list of features are a hallmark of the build trap. Instead, strategy should be a flexible framework—comprising a vision, strategic intents, and product initiatives—that empowers teams to discover the best path to a goal.

Instead of a roadmap saying 'Q1: Build Feature X, Q2: Build Feature Y,' a strategic framework might state a company vision ('Become the easiest platform for small businesses to manage finances') and a strategic intent for the year ('Increase new user activation by 30%'). This allows product teams to experiment with various initiatives, like a better onboarding flow or new templates, to achieve that intent.

Use the 'Product Kata' to Navigate Uncertainty

The Product Kata is a scientific, repeatable routine for product development. It creates a rhythm of analyzing the current state, setting a target condition, and then methodically experimenting to move towards it.

A team wants to improve user retention. Using the Product Kata, they first analyze data to understand why users are leaving (current condition). They then set a target: 'Increase 30-day retention for new users from 20% to 25%.' Finally, they run a series of small, rapid experiments—like sending targeted onboarding emails or simplifying a key workflow—to see what moves the needle, learning and adjusting with each step.

Go deeper into these insights in the full book:
Buy on Amazon
Listen to the full audio book with an Audible Free Trial.
As an Amazon Associate, qualifying purchases help support this site.