Book recommendation: Escaping the build trap
On how to build the right thing
I’ve worked in a few organizations that were transitioning to a “product operating model”. The idea is to move away from projects with limited time spans and fixed scopes and towards products that are more stable and deliver sustained value. While this makes sense, it’s very tricky to do in practice. Even many companies that would call themselves product-driven have products that users don’t particularly like and attempt to “fix” this with top-down directives.
The book Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value by Melissa Perri of Product School is the best book I’ve read yet on how to get teams and managers out of output-driven doom cycles.
Why you should read it
The book offers plenty of useful frameworks and exercises. My copy is full of dog-ears, stars and underlines of workshop ideas and questions to ask in the moments when managers are sweating and tending toward a quick decision. For example, there are tools for helping managers identify what they know, what they don’t know, and what they need to find out before making a product-related decision. This is invaluable to helping teams make sure they’re on the right path, and have the courage to pivot if they’re not. What sets this book apart, though, is how these frameworks and exercises are explained.
The book follows a fictional online marketing course company that is doing product all wrong. The company is losing market share and doesn’t understand why its retention numbers are bad. Teams are shipping features (that their bonuses are tied to), but the company is still floundering. Reading the initial explanation of the company, I could feel the pain and frustration of managers and teams trying their best, but still coming up short.
This fictional company is used throughout the book, and the suggestions for crucial components like strategy, process and organizational set up are explained with this concrete example. I found this made the tools more memorable. It also made them more believable, as it showed the resistance they might receive.
My key takeaways
The right kind of customer contact
People often talk about “customer contact” as the key to successful products. Perri would agree with that: she even gives tips for product managers who are told they “aren’t allowed” to talk to customers (I’ve seen this first hand, with product teams being blocked by sales teams who don’t want to “show weakness” to customers or come to them “without a finished product”). However, just talking to customers isn’t enough. You need customer data. Perri talks about setting meaningful metrics for customer success, and how to measure them. Talking directly to customers without also measuring success metrics can lead to what Perri calls “Waiter Product Management”. This means that the PM acts like a waiter in a restaurant. They don’t think strategically but simply fulfill customer asks directly, which is unsustainable overtime. Compare this to A/B testing a new feature, which gets real data that can be used to decide if and how to roll out the new feature to customers.
Experimentation is always possible
Building the right thing involves a lot of experimentation to validate unknowns. Companies often fall into traps of over-engineering solutions and dictating how they should look, often based on assumptions of what they think customers want. Particularly in industries that are accustomed to slower development cycles, like energy, there is a sense that agility and thoroughness are at odds. One of my favorite examples in the book was of a company that Perri advised in the wearables space. The company’s lead time for development changes was very long, taking years to add new features to the wearable device. Thus, it was incredibly important for the company to be sure they were building the right features. To experiment and test, they made prototypes out of smart phones and did extensive testing with perspective customers. The features that proved to be most important in these extensive experimentation rounds were vastly different than the ones the company’s leadership had originally thought were important.
Self assessment
One of my favorite parts of Perri’s book is the list of questions she leaves at the end. The questions are meant for product managers to ask before joining a new organization to see if they’re really product-driven. But I think they also make a great self-assessement tool. Two of my favorite questions are:
Who came up with the last feature or product idea you had?
The answer shouldn’t be “my manager”.
What are you currently working on?
Perri says product managers should be more excited to talk about the problem they’re solving than the current feature they’re shipping.
You can read the other questions at the end of the book. Pick up your copy here.
Think about it…
How do you measure customer success, quantiatively?
How much space do your teams have to experiment?