# Escaping the Build Trap  ## Metadata - Author: [[Melissa Perri]] - Full Title: Escaping the Build Trap - Category: #books ## Highlights - The build trap is when organizations become stuck measuring their success by outputs rather than outcomes. ([Location 149](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=149)) - Everyone is so focused on shipping more software that they lose sight of what is important: producing value for customers, hitting business goals, and innovating against competitors. ([Location 229](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=229)) - To get out of the build trap, you need look at the entire company, not just at the development team. Are you optimizing your organization to continually produce value? Are you set up to grow and sustain products as a company? This is what a product-led organization does. ([Location 240](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=240)) - Value, from a business perspective, is pretty straightforward. It’s something that can fuel your business: money, data, knowledge capital, or promotion. Every feature you build and any initiative you take as a company should result in some outcome that is tied back to that business value. ([Location 262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=262)) - 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. ([Location 266](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=266)) - Outputs are easily quantified things that we produce — number of products or features, number of releases, or velocity of development teams. Outcomes are the things that result when we finally deliver those features and the customer problems are solved. True value is realized in these outcomes, both for the business and for the user or customer. ([Location 307](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=307)) - To be strategic and to have people operate strategically, we need to stop judging teams based on the quantity of features shipped. We should instead define and measure value and then celebrate them for delivering on outcomes for our business and users. ([Location 315](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=315)) - Products, as I said before, are vehicles of value. They deliver value repeatedly to customers and users, without requiring the company to build something new every time. ([Location 331](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=331)) - Companies that optimize their products to achieve value are called product-led organizations. These organizations are characterized by product-driven growth, scaling their organization through software products, and optimizing them until they reach the desired outcomes. ([Location 347](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=347)) - Product-led companies understand that the success of their products is the primary driver of growth and value for their company. They prioritize, organize, and strategize around product success. This is what gets them out of the build trap. ([Location 351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=351)) - Sales-led companies let their contracts define their product strategy. ([Location 357](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=357)) - Visionary-led companies can be very powerful — when you have the right visionary. But, there aren’t too many Steve Jobses floating around. Also, when that visionary leaves, what happens to the product direction? It usually crumbles. ([Location 370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=370)) - Another common way of operating is the technology-led company. These companies are driven by the latest and coolest technology. The problem is that they often suffer from a lack of a market-facing, value-led strategy. ([Location 376](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=376)) - Product strategy connects the business, market, and technology together so that they are all working in harmony. ([Location 380](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=380)) - Product-led companies optimize for their business outcomes, align their product strategy to these goals, and then prioritize the most effective projects that will help develop those products into sustainable drivers of growth. ([Location 383](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=383)) - your known knowns. These are facts that you gather from data or critical requirements from customers. ([Location 398](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=398)) - Known unknowns are clarified enough that you know which question to ask. They are assumptions that you want to test, data points that you can investigate, or problems that you can identify and explore. ([Location 401](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=401)) - Unknown knowns are those moments when you say, “I feel like this is the right thing to do.” This is intuition from years of experience. ([Location 403](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=403)) - The unknown unknowns are the things that you don’t know you don’t know. You don’t know enough to ask the right questions or identify the knowledge gaps. These are the moments of surprise that need to be discovered. ([Location 406](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=406)) - Product managers identify features and products that will solve customer problems while achieving business goals. They optimize the Value Exchange System. ([Location 412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=412)) - 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? ([Location 423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=423)) - The chief product officer is the cornerstone of the product team in companies, helping to tie together the business outcomes to the roadmap and to represent its impact to the board. ([Location 427](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=427)) - 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. ([Location 550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=550)) - Product management is about looking at the entire system — the requirements, the feature components, the value propositions, the user experience, the underlying business model, the pricing and the integrations — and figuring out how it can produce revenue for the company. ([Location 585](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=585)) - A product manager must be tech literate, not tech fluent. ([Location 591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=591)) - “The biggest thing I’ve learned in product management is to always focus on the problem. If you anchor yourself with the why, you will be more likely to build the right thing,” ([Location 639](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=639)) - Too often, product managers dive into creating solutions without thinking through the associated risks. ([Location 645](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=645)) - A good product manager is taught how to prioritize work against clear, outcome-oriented goals, to define and discover real customer and business value, and to determine what processes are needed to reduce the uncertainty about the product’s success in the market. ([Location 669](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=669)) - In SAFe, product managers are the managers of product owners and are responsible for external-facing interactions and work. They speak to the customers, they define the requirements and scope of the products to be built, and they communicate these down to the product owners. The product owners are internal facing, defining the components of the solution and working with developers to ship it. ([Location 705](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=705)) - The product managers without Scrum teams or with smaller teams (a UX designer and one developer, for example) help validate and contribute to that strategy for future products. After we validate the direction, we create larger Scrum teams around these people and build out solutions. ([Location 720](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07K3QBWG1&location=720))