Book Review - Escaping the Build Trap by Mellisa Perri

As a product manager, what is more important - outcome or output? That the core question this book revolves around. Organizations are concerned about delivering value to the users of the product. But many times, we clearly do not identify where to focus to deliver the value. Many times we are caught in the trap of building more features, content assuming that more features mean more value. This book helps us focus on the sources of real value. 

As a product manager, you can clearly correlate with the examples and concepts discussed in the book. Melissa brings a definitive clarity on where to focus the most. e.g. With the Netflix example, she mentions Reed Hastings - CEO of Netflix - decided to shut down the widely researched streaming player as he found the real value in the online content and not the hardware player. Melissa mentions iterates how brutally prioritizing the feature backlog helps Transferwise to only focus on the most valuable features.

Throughout her book, Melissa shares her wise thoughts and experiences through a fictional organization. I personally could correlate how the management is typically focused on the output (story points, velocity...) whereas the real value is by tirelessly testing, executing, and measuring the assumptions to convert them in features. This is obviously an upstream journey and requires the product manager to battle with the internal and external stakeholders. However, without these validations, the team is only delivering the features (output) and not the value (outcome). 

This book is a good read for aspiring product managers, current product managers, and management folks who could learn how to build less and gain more.