Melissa Perri
Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value
ISBN: 978-1-491-97379-0
Your company is probably measuring the wrong things. Many companies fall into the trap of “vanity metrics” – numbers that look good on paper but aren’t moving the company forward. In my experience listening to startups and early-stage companies pitch, there have been countless mentions of follower counts on social media and numbers of features released for a product. If these figures aren’t translating into sales, they really don’t matter. Building a sustainable, profitable business should be the goal of every founder and CEO.
I picked up a copy of Escaping the Build Trap during EntreFest this past June – can’t pass up the free books table – and had a chance to dig into it after the conference. I found that a good chunk of the book was closely related to things I’ve been teaching new entrepreneurs for years. The first section starts off discussing the “value exchange” – what value a company and its products provide to their customers. This exchange of money for product boils down to the problem being solved for the customer. Taking customer needs and wants into account determines how a product or service creates value for a customer.
The language of the book is heavily based in scrum and agile methodology, but the author is not completely tied to this. Agile methodology and lean development allow for many of the tests put forward by Perri in her example company. Most software development firms use this methodology today, and startups function better as lean organizations due to resource constraints. Finding the proper metrics through small experiments fits right into lean startup methodology, where focused tests with very specific groups of customers can produce valuable results.
Becoming a product-led company is the focus of the text. The author spent a great deal of time differentiating between projects and products, specifically project managers and product managers. The goal is to organize the company and the work around products, each of which involve several projects to complete in pursuit of product development. Many companies end up as sales-led, visionary-led, and technology-led – you can probably think of examples of each. As I’ve mentioned in other posts in this blog: nobody cares about the technology or the personality of the company leadership as long as the product solves a problem.
While the book is not terribly lengthy, it is structured more like a textbook than other books in this review series. The example company story was woven throughout the text, but the book is broken up in a way that it could be used well in a classroom setting. The bulk of the book’s information was found in the first half of the book – it almost seemed like the author started running out of ideas toward the end of the book, as the chapters became much shorter toward the end. I managed to read through the book in a weekend, but I feel as though it would have been fun to read through the text as part of a group or in a class.
Overall, 8/10, would recommend to both early-career product and project managers looking for a way to improve their teams, as well as startup founders struggling to find a direction. Product management is an important skill, both for startup founders and those who manage teams in larger companies. Escaping the Build Trap is an incredibly accessible resource for those who feel they need help refocusing on the things that matter for their organization.