Escaping the Build Trap

Afterword: Escaping the Build Trap to Become Product-Led

Someone recently asked me, “What is the most important thing you learned through your career as a product manager?”

I was a bit stumped. See, there wasn’t just one thing I had learned—​but many things I needed to learn at different stages of my career.

When I was first starting off as a product manager, I needed to learn about humility. I learned that my role was not that of the big idea generator but that of the bad idea terminator. I needed to learn to be humble and to gain the support and buy-in of my team in order to make great products. Experimenting with my team taught me the power of data. Data beats any opinion every time.

As I moved on to more senior roles, I learned that having a good strategic framework could make or break a company. That if you did not judge people for success by outcomes, you would never achieve those outcomes. I watched a few companies crumble under the weight of a bad strategic framework.

Becoming a consultant taught me about the power of personalities in an organization. People will get in the way of a good product every time. Even if it is the best idea for the company, if it doesn’t meet the personal agendas of senior stakeholders, it can be squashed. To mitigate that risk, you need to deeply understand what motivates people and to know how you can address their personal motivations by introducing information and data that wins them over.

Consulting also taught me that one of the quickest ...