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“Escaping the build trap By Melissa Perri” is always on the list of must-read books for Product Managers.
This blog is the fifth part of my book summary. You can find the first part here, the second part here, the third part here and the fourth part here.
This final part provides ideas around communication, culture, politics and rewards for a product-led organization.
Outcome-focused communication
If you keep things transparent, you will have more freedom to become autonomous.
When leaders do not see sufficient communication or progress toward goals, they resort to measuring progress on the output delivered rather than the outcome.
The author recommends the following cadence:
- Quarterly business reviews - senior leadership meet to discuss how the outcome of product initiatives has furthered strategic intent.
- Product Initiative review - the CPO, CTO, VP of product, design leaders and product managers meeting to review the progress of options again the product initiatives.
- Release reviews - the product team meets to review the features that are in the pipeline to be released.
Rewards and incentives
Oftentimes, bonuses are tied to the fact that features/products are shipped at all. This is what gets people into the build trap. Leaders of organizations should reward people for moving the business forward - achieving outcomes, learning about their users and finding the right business opportunities.
Safety and learning
Leaders should adopt the product mindset and give people the freedom to fail fast and early.
There should be boundaries for experiments. One way to set boundaries would be the amount of investment that is available to be made for experimentation. Another way to set boundaries is to release the changes only to a subset of users (Alpha or Beta users).
Budgeting
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In many companies, budgets are set on a yearly basis. It does not give scope for the teams to change course during the year as they are committed to delivering what was budgeted for the year.
The author advises moving away from this old budgeting model to a new model where budgets are allocated to the product portfolio as a whole. The product leaders can then determine which product initiatives to allocate budgets on depending on the phase of work and the certainty of outcomes.
Customer Centricity
The author says a team can be truly product-led only when it has a culture that focuses on the customer.
The core of being customer-centric is to put yourself into your customer’s shoes and ask, “What would make my customers happy and move our business forward?”.
Hope you found these notes helpful. You can find the first part here, the second part here, the third part here and the fourth part here.
Thanks for reading.