Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

For too long, product teams have defined their work as shipping the next release. When we engage with stakeholders, we talk about our roadmaps and our backlogs. During our performance reviews, we highlight all the great features we implemented. The vast majority of our conversations take place in the solution space. We assume that success comes fro

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Good product managers think in terms of delivering superior value to the market place during inbound planning and achieving market share and revenue goals during outbound. Bad product managers get very confused about the differences amongst delivering value, matching competitive features, pricing, and ubiquity.

High-level insight

Most companies do not operate in ways they realize their vision by continuously aligning business goals with customers' needs and pain points. Product teams need to be aligned on business objectives and be allowed to operate at an initiative level to impact those objectives.

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The job of a product manager is to marshal the resources of their team to drive business value. Your team will be given problems (e.g. grow adoption of a product, reduce churn of a service, increase conversion of a flow), and your responsibility will be to guide your team to make it less of a problem. A strategy, paired with a clear vision, is esse... See more

I’ll refer to the work that you do to decide what to build as discovery and the work that you do to build and ship a product as delivery. This distinction matters. As you’ll see, many companies put a heavy emphasis on delivery—they focus on whether you shipped what you said you would on time and on budget—while under-investing in discovery, forgett... See more