Escaping the Build Trap
"To stay competitive in today's market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You'll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small"--Page 4 of cover.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
6mentions
6people
2019–2026years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- IMO this is the consequence of a relentless focus on feature development over core product refinement. I often have the impression that Anthropic would benefit from a few senior product people. Someone needs to lend them a copy of “Escaping the Build Trap.” Just because we _can_ rapidly add features now doesn’t mean we should.
PS I’m not referencing a well-known book to suggest the solution is trite product group think, but good product thinking is a talent separate from good engineering, and Anthropic seems short on the later recently
- I forgot to follow up here, so apologies for the delay. Honestly, concise is a challenge here. Here is a lot of words, and they barely scratch the surface, but just in case they might be helpful:
- Embracing the idea of a manual valuable process is a great one - as engineers we often want to start by automating and/or building, and dive right in - only to realize later we either didn't understand the product, or our stakeholder didn't and now wants changes once they've seen what it does. (Deeper dives here: "Escaping the Build Trap"[1], "The Minimalist Entrepreneur"[2]
- Understanding negotiation is extremely helpful as you are often operating under constraints, and need to get those across to your stakeholders such that you can both move forward together. Negotiation is basically about aligning two stakeholders with different goals and arriving at an arrangement they can both live with. (Highly recommend "Negotiate without Fear"[3])
- Another excellent concept surrounds the theory of constraints and getting good at recognizing bottlenecks, and subordinating all other processes to them. Essentially, if work is piling up somewhere, look at where it is coming from, and attempt to re-route those efforts to something productive (the bottleneck moves the same speed regardless of how much work is piled up in front of it). The classic book on this matter is "The Goal"[4] but a fun retelling more oriented around an IT department is "The Phoenix Project"[5].
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Escaping-Build-Trap-Effective-Managem... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Minimalist-Entrepreneur-Great-Founder... [3] https://www.amazon.com/Negotiate-without-Fear-Strategies-Max... [4] https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0... [5] https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Busine...
- I am a technical product manager, used to be a software engineer, and made the switch a couple years ago now - wrote a bit about it here https://bobbiechen.com/blog/2021/11/28/moving-to-product-man... , but here's some more notes:
1. Actions - my manager also offered that I could spend more time doing something more product-oriented in a transition period. My team owned an internal tool for managing firewalls with many long-standing UX complaints, so I took the opportunity to redesign it - collecting and summarizing the past complaints, putting together a new design, and testing it with users. Then I implemented it myself, shipped it, collected relevant metrics, and made some tweaks for later feedback. This was pretty successful, I liked it, and I took the chance to switch to be a PM full-time when a new role opened on a different team in the department.
2. Resources - Inspired (Marty Cagan), and Escaping the Build Trap (Melissa Perri) are good starting points. My company also sent me to Pragmatic Institute training, which didn't cover new ground but did provide lots of template docs if that's your style.
3. A note of advice: going from dev to PM gives you certain strengths. You're naturally going to have a stronger opinion on developer-focused products, APIs, SDKs, etc., and better ideas of what's easy/hard/impossible to implement technically. This is good, but it's not a substitute for talking to your customers/prospects and engineering team. It's really important to actually talk to people, whether by video meetings or chat/email/doc comments.
Also happy to chat in more detail, I'm reachable by the form on the homepage of my website.
- I would recommend Escaping the Build Trap - https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/escaping-the-build/9781...
- > just decide your own roadmap and stick with it?
While this may sound like it's easier to manage it usually ends up with a product that does not solve the problem of the customer.
As a product manager solving problems of your user or customer must be the first priority. The only way to do this is getting closer to the customer.
I find teams shielded from customers via business teams use the best part of their product management and engineering skills (microservices included) to manage their business team and not the customers.
There is a constant grooming of the backlog with features and pressure to keep the engineers managed and busy.
Start measurning the value of each feature to your customers. Have short customer feedback cycles for planned features. Your backlog should reflect solutions that make sense to the customer.
The book "Escaping the build trap" talks about this. I highly recommend the book.
Good books on the subject talks against roadmaps and shifting to a value and goal based approach.
- Here's a list of books I have compiled as a fairly fresh PM (just getting started with the reading). The intention with this list is to built up a good mental tool box to succeed in product management (coming from SW+chip design).
PM:
Marketing:- Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love - The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback - Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value - What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Service - Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age
UX- Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers - Brand Identity Breakthrough: How to Craft Your Company's Unique Story to Make Your Products Irresistible
Organization / Business- Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability - The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition
Personal- Originals: How Non-conformists Change the World - Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company - Lovability: How to Build a Business That People Love and Be Happy Doing It - The Thank You Economy
Also, blogs:- Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery - TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking - Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World - How To Win Friends and Influence People - Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It - Thinking in Systems: A Primer - Thinking, Fast and Slow
Edit: Formatting- Rich Mironov's Product Bytes - Aha! Blog - Inside Intercom - Mind the Product - PMHQ blog - Silicon Valley Product Group - The Accidental Product Manager - The Product Bistro - The Product Guy - The Secret Product Manager Handbook
