Escaping the Build Trap

Preface

The point is, you can’t keep doing the same thing and expect it to keep working. We had to do something different, but the really hard question was, “What is it?” We made plenty of mistakes along the way to answering that question, but the most important thing we identified was that we needed to know more about our customers and what problems they were really trying to solve in their businesses—even if they didn’t neatly fit into an existing category of ours.

Michael Dell¹

This book is for every product person. It’s for the senior in college who wants to be a product manager but doesn’t quite understand the full landscape of the job. It’s for the first-time product manager who was thrown into the fray and is looking for guidance. It’s for the product manager, just promoted to VP, who needs a guide to set up their organization so that it scales successfully. It’s for the leaders of large organizations who are looking to obtain that competitive advantage.

About a decade ago, I was working as a product manager in an e-commerce company, chugging along, writing large requirement documents, shipping them to developers, and, frankly, thinking that I was the bomb. A much-needed dose of reality was thrown in my face when we began measuring the success of our products. I soon learned that my products were crap, and no one was using them.

That was my first realization that I was in what I now call, the build trap. I was so focused on shipping features and developing as many cool ...