Escaping the Build Trap

Appendix A. Appendix: Six Questions to Determine Whether a Company Is Product-Led

Who came up with the last feature or product idea you built?

If I ask a product manager this question, I hope to see a look of confusion on his or her face. “What do you mean who came up with it? Well, our team did. Right? That’s how it normally works.” This kind of response is a sign of a healthy product management organization, in which management sets the goals and the team is given room to figure out how to reach them. The product manager should be leading the charge to discover user problems and to solve them. This doesn’t mean that an important initiative or solution idea can’t come from management every once in a while, but that should be the exception, not the rule.

It’s a huge red flag when a team not only can’t take ownership for what it is building, but can’t even tell me why it is building it. This means that the originator of the idea never connected the why to the what.

What was the last product you decided to kill?

Another sign of an unhealthy product management culture is the inability to kill a product or idea that will not help a company reach its goals. If you hear, “We never really kill anything,” it often means that there’s a pretty big problem.

Typically, this happens for one of the following reasons:

• The organization already committed the idea to customers. Often, someone from marketing has promised a client that a particular feature is in the works and then the company ...