Book Summary:
Perri refers to a situation in which an organisation is trapped measuring its performance in terms of outputs rather than the business consequences those outputs lead to as the "build trap." Examples of outputs are the projects, features, or goods that the product team completes.
A business that prioritises output often produces products that neither address consumer needs nor command a premium from users. Perri explains in the book how a business can escape the build trap and transform into a customer-value-maximizing, product-led enterprise.
I highly suggest this book for PMs and leaders in Tech.
The book's main lessons for me were:
My Impressions
The fact that breaking free from the construct trap necessitates a leap of faith from the entire leadership team is one of the main factors holding businesses in it. In order to catch up on user research, the organisation needs to slow down feature development, go into discovery mode, and have faith in the product teams to overcome strategic roadblocks. The development teams may appear to be losing momentum if feature development slows down for a leadership team accustomed to output-focused success measures. It is imperative to switch to outcome-based success measurements prior to attempting the change.
Before any change can occur, the leadership team's buy-in is assumed in the book. Whether the transformation may be carried out from the bottom up without significant (first) support from upper management is an intriguing subject that remains unsolved. In order to initiate the change from the lower echelons of the company, the product teams would have to push back on feature requests and provide space for user research.
The product teams would need to fight back against the top-down feature wish lists and make space to catch up on user research in order to initiate the change from the lower echelons of the organisation.
All things considered, the best book I've read about creating a product-led company is Escaping the Build Trap. Perri has succeeded in identifying a real issue that impacts numerous product development companies.
Top Quotes from the book:
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.
When companies do not understand their customers’ or users’ problems well, they cannot possibly define value for them. Instead of doing the work to learn this information about customers, they create a proxy that is easy to measure. “Value” becomes the quantity of features that are delivered, and, as a result, the number of features shipped becomes the primary metric of success.
Companies often confuse the building to learn and building to earn.
Product management is a career, not just a role you play on a team. The product manager deeply understands both the business and the customer to identify the right opportunities to produce value. They are responsible for synthesizing multiple pieces of data, including user analytics, customer feedback, market research, and stakeholder opinions, and then determining in which direction the team should move. They keep the team focused on the why — why are we building this product, and what outcome will it produce?
