Escaping the build trap, by Melissa Perri

Content

Terms

Summary of Ideas

What is the build trap?

The Build Trap is the authors term for the common pattern in technology teams of building the wrong thing, and so ending up with products that no-one wants.

Her hypothesis is that the major cause of the build trap is that the organization is focused on outputs - “we released 10 features”, “we met our deadlines” - not outcomes - measuring the value being given to the customer. The prerequisite for this is putting much more emphasis on thinking in terms of the product being offered instead of narrower focuses on projects and services.

This problem starts at the top: The organization as a whole should be product-led - that is, optimizing for business outcomes. Every change to a product should tie back to producing value to the customer.

She claims this is a problem with the product management function of the technology organization, and the solution is to set up robust product management practices. There are four interconnected areas which comprise these practices. Interconnected because, for example, if the organization is not product-led, the PM function will not be incentivized to create practices that focus on outcomes.

The Company and the strategy

Sorry in advance for corporate bullshit terms - not my fault.

Company Vision

Your business has a vision10 10 I’ve left out the distinction between vision and mission that’s in the text, I don’t think it adds much . Why does the company exist? Where is it going based on that mission? You want a vision to act as an anchor point which you can always fall back on when you’re thinking about what you should do.

The vision should be short and clear. Not too broadly focused. “Being the market leader in X” is too broad. There should be something in there that narrows the scope a bit.

To offer designer eyewear at a revolutionary price, while leading the way for socially conscious businesses.

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.

Strategic Intents

From your company vision, you create strategic intents. These are the current areas of focus to move your company towards the vision. The time-scope is usually a year or two. You shouldn’t not have too many of them: just a few key things.

The trap that the C-suite fall into, and that strategic intents are trying to avoid, is going into your yearly planning cycle you are just coming up with a laundry list of ideas for goals, features or desires. The problem is not that the ideas are bad, it’s that they are usually not aligned to any broader strategy, pushing the business in particular direction. It’s just sort of aimless.

Strategic intents should be high level and business focused. They should be stated at the level of new markets, new revenue streams, or focusing on a particular area with an associated revenue goal.

Here are the two strategic intents for the example company in the book, with associated goals.

Expand into the enterprise business: Increase revenue from currently $5 million a year to $60 million a year in three years.

Double revenue growth from individual users: Increase revenue growth from 15% YoY to 30% YoY from individual users.

Strategic intents can involve the whole business: product development, marketing, content creation etc. Obviously we’re only looking at the product development piece here.

So what to do with these strategic intents? This is where we get out of the Company level and into the product level.

The product and product management

A product is a vehicle for delivering value. You sell it (or rent it) to the customer, and you collect the revenue from it. You also improve the product over time, so it delivers more value11 11 Note this is different from a service, which requires you to put in time and effort for every ‘unit’ of value that’s delivered to the customer. . Product management is this process of determining why, how and when to improve the product12 12 If your company has more than one product, then it is said to have a product portfolio. This introduces a further layer in the strategy-to-product journey, so we’ll ignore it for now and assume that there’s a single product. .

Product initiatives

We left the company strategy process at the point where we’d got to some strategic intents. These are business goals about expanding into new markets or growing an existing revenue stream. For example: Increase revenue growth from 15% YoY to 30% YoY from individual users.

Next we need to turn these into product initiatives. These translate the challenge laid down by the strategic intent into problems that we will solve with our product. How can we reach the business goals by changing the product.

Notice that this the focus is on problem identification and exploration, not on solution development - that comes later. Premature solution fixation is one of the biggest traps to fall into in this stage.

For example, there are 3 paths to increasing revenue:

The third is slightly different, but the first two we can dive into exploration.

First we should look to verify and quantify: What is the conversion rate? What is the retention rate? Then we have to figure out why users are not converting, and why they are leaving. This is where user feedback, talking to the users, starts to become critical. This is where we start to find the problems.

What is product management, and what makes a good product manager?

Part of being a Product Manager (PM) is being the Product Owner - but only in a sense. They are responsible for the why: determining and communicating why the product is being built and the outcome it will produce. They are not responsible for the when. They do not own (but do work with the team on) the what. They don’t care much about the how of the technical implementation.

They need to have a very deep understanding of the business and the customer, so they can identify what is valuable, and see opportunities to create value. They should talk to (and otherwise get feedback from) the customer a lot. Empathy for the customer is the critical attribute. Tech-literacy is a must, but tech-expertise is not.

They should not be a mini-dictator, lording it over the team; a waiter, mindlessly communicating customer requests to developers; or a pseudo project manager, taking ownership of the when.

The why is the product vision. The PM needs to have the vision and to effectively communicate it. They need to determine metrics and goals for the product. They need to be given the time and space to do vision and research work.

Tactical product management

2hr read notes

Preface

Four Layers

Appendix: Is your org product-led? Questions for a PM

Part 1: The build trap

What We Know

Part 2: the role of the PM

Product Death Cycle
The PM career path

Part 3: Strategy

Gaps

Part 4: PM Process

Pirate Metrics

Part 5: The product led organization

Quotes

A lot of it is due to having too many priorities. Everything is number one on your project list. You are peanut-buttering your strategy—meaning that you have so many strategic initiatives spread over very few people. You can’t give one team a large objective and expect them to hit major goals in a month. Those things take time and manpower. You have to build up to them. - Page 5

Strategy is a deployable decision-making framework, enabling action to achieve desired outcomes, constrained by current capabilities, coherently aligned to the existing context. - Page 62

Questions

What are the responsibilities of a product manager?

  1. a PM is not a UX designer
  2. interface with the business, tech and design depts. to harness their collective knowledge
  3. A PM doesn’t have much direct authority
  4. A PM is primarily responsible for the why of the product, the direction of it. They are involved in the what (workflows, UX etc.) and when, but these are owned by the team as a whole. They are barely at all involved in the how - that’s the devs job.
  5. They craft the product vision, communicate it, and champion it.
  6. They break down the purpose of the product into known knowns (facts), known unknowns (questions, which they seek to answer), unknown knowns (intuition, which they seek to validate) and unknown unknowns (discovery, which they put processes in place to facilitate)
  7. They connect the dots, taking information from various sources and sifting and analyzing it, and turning that into the product vision.
  8. It comprises product ownership (in the Scrum definition), of defining th backlog and creating user stories, grooming work in the backlog, and checking completed work. But that doesn’t cover the whole thing

What makes a good product manager?

  1. talking to users
  2. the ability to empathize with users, walk a mile in their shoes.
  3. the ability to persuade and influence the team and the company that what is being built is the right thing.
  4. not being too attached to your own ideas - your job is creating value, not implementing your ideas. So…
  5. listening to criticism of your ideas and creating a process for iterating them into good ideas
  6. validate your ideas by seeking out data. Evidence, not opinions
  7. get problems, wants and needs from customers, not solutions.
  8. They push back against managers and stakeholders when they present solutions, asking why.
  9. Have a deep understanding of the business: what its goals are, what its strategy is, how their product relates to that strategy.
  10. They are technically literate, but don’t have to be a tech expert
  11. They understand the market, but don’t have to be a market expert.

What makes a bad product manager?

  1. the mini dictator (don’t be an asshole to UX and devs)
  2. the waiter, taking what stakeholders ask for at face value, allowing the priority to be dictated by the most important person in the room.
  3. the reformed project manager, focusing on the when, not they why.
  4. A lone wold mentality - a feeling that they alone are responsible for the success of the product, and that they have to come up with it themselves without input from others.

What makes a good product management function?

Why do companies fall into the build trap?

  1. They don’t understand their customers wants, needs or problems, and so they can’t measure value. Because some targets are required, they create proxies that they can measure, but don’t represent value: features shipped etc.
  2. They face unthinking pressure to fast-follow competitors, superficially copying their features without understanding whether those features are valuable.
  3. They over-promise during sales pitches, leading to one-off features that were not worth the investment because they are not widely useful. Where the strategy is driven by the contracts the company can get, the company is a sales led organization.
  4. the product death cycle They do not find out what their customers problems are, they just ask them what features are missing and build those features without validating them.

Misc

Why questions