I first encountered Melissa Perri when I joined a workshop on mobile UX at Agile 2015 that she was co-facilitating. I didn’t realize how little I knew about UX design until that workshop! Not long afterwards, I first heard her give a keynote on the Build Trap. Maybe other people were talking about focusing on outcomes rather than outputs, but I first heard it from Melissa. All of that prodded me to approach the designers on my own software delivery team and learn more by working with them. I changed my approach to testing. I started thinking about “How is this valuable to the customer” rather than “OK, the product owner wants this feature, how will I test it”.
This book is about creating an effective product management organization. However, it is valuable to every team member, not only the product manager. Each of us should be thinking about what problems customers want to solve and how we can deliver chunks of that value frequently and sustainably. As a tester, I feel I have a lot to learn from the “great project manager” that Melissa describes in this book - able to collaborate with business stakeholders, technical team members, and designers. The kinds of questions that great product managers ask, as described here, inspire me to ask better questions from a testing perspective.
Techniques like the Product Kata are practical ways for teams to build a vision through continual learning and involving everyone in the organization. When we’re heads down in the trenches developing software, it’s easy to lose track of what’s valuable to the business and customers. The real-life examples here, with hypotheses supported by ways to measure progress, let readers see how we can apply these on our own teams.
The techniques for solution exploration are such effective ways to guide software development with business-facing tests and experiments. I’m lucky to have seen experiments like this succeed “in the wild”. No matter what your role on a team, particularly an agile team, the insights in this book will help you do a better job of getting value to your customer frequently.
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About This Book
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.
The version of Escaping the Build Trap you are about to read is the fourth rewrite of this book in three years. It is a culmination of what I have learned about how roles, strategy, process, and organizational dynamics affect the value that a company can deliver.
This book is a guide to getting out of the build trap with great product management. We look at what it means to become and be a product-led organization, which involves four key components:
- Creating a product manager role with the right responsibilities and structure
- Enabling those product managers with a strategy that promotes good decision making
- Understanding the process of determining what product to build, through experimentation and optimization
- Supporting everyone with the right organizational policies, culture, and rewards to allow product management to thrive
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