Review

David Pereira's book is packed with insights that deeply resonate with my own experiences. Works like this and ‘Escaping the Build Trap’ bolster my confidence that product management is evolving into a more self-aware, efficient, and value-focused discipline. This is a great read for product leaders thinking about their product development operating model.

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Transformed

Initially, I was skeptical about this one, as it's been plagued with delays and it seems the author changed midway through the process, with Marty stepping up to rescue the book.

andrewclark.co.uk

Lean UX

Even though it seems positioned more toward designers, this is an incredibly important book for product managers. It does a great job of integrating the concepts from Lean Startup with existing methodologies (Design Thinking, Agile, UX design). It’s packed full of principles and practical implementation advice for teams. There’s little in this book I disagree with.

andrewclark.co.uk

The Right It

Marty Cagan acknowledges in "Inspired" that most of our products and features won't meet expectations, and the ones that do require a lot of iteration to reach that point. I believe this is THE most important observation about product development. This book does a great job of articulating that phenomenon and proposes a robust way to navigate it. This is the best book on validating product ideas that I’ve read. I will forever be sharing this book.

andrewclark.co.uk

Book Review and Summary: Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri

Get a comprehensive review and summary of the best-selling book "Escaping the Build Trap" by Melissa Perri, the product development expert. Learn about the key principles and practices for creating successful products and avoiding common pitfalls in the product development process.

andrewclark.co.uk

Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• If your conditions aren’t ideal, don’t become a victim of your circumstances. Instead challenge the status quo and begin a step-by-step transformation approach
• Two types of product development:
• Coordinative → Energy is focused on organising work and coordinating teams to avoid mistakes and failures, creating rigidity and fear of blame. Agreeing on a plan becomes the goal, as the strategy is unclear.
• Collaborative → Team members collaborate to uncover opportunities and create value for customers and the business. They are flexible in their approach, focusing on driving value. Trust is key, people take responsibility and find solutions when issues arise. Teams start with simple plans, adapt based on evidence, and are guided by an overarching goal to create value.
• How fast can you drop bad ideas? Dropping ideas creates space and freedom for promising ones. Expect to drop 50% of ideas quickly.
• Investing time in testing critical assumptions will help you decide what ideas are worth pursuing. Always look for evidence of desirability.

• Agile Swarming - Reality check survey: How many of these do you see?
• Output over outcome
• Opinions over evidence
• Prescriptive roadmaps over embracing the unknown
• Meeting deadlines over achieving goals
• Implementing solutions over solving problems.

• Some of the biggest distractions from real product work:
1. Gathering requirements
2. Extensive product backlog
3. Output metrics and obsessing over velocity
4. Consensus-driven decisions
5. Output approval
6. Meeting marathons
7. Fear of saying no
8. Being the middle man between people teams
9. Opinion-driven decisions
10. Failure avoidance
• The chances are high that 50% of features you’ve build are ignored and drive no value.

• Don’t follow frameworks and process blindly → instead be adaptable and focus on creating value.
• The key ingredients of product management are strategy, discovery and delivery. Without a product strategy, teams struggle to make decisions and become disempowered. Without product discovery, failures will be costly. Product discovery acts as the glue between strategy and delivery.
• Product Strategy simplifies decision making by telling us where to focus.
• Who → Define who you’re serving and who you’re leaving out.
• Why → Give the context while connecting it with your vision.
• What → Define what you envision achieving and name what’s intentionally left out.
• How long → A time frame is necessary to facilitate deciding on suitable options.
• Product discovery helps you learn what’s valuable and quickly drop ideas that don’t survive a confrontation with reality.
• Product delivery should be about creating outcomes. Shipping features at lightning speed isn’t a sign of delivering value, it shows only that they are efficient in creating output.Elements of meaningful product delivery:
• Start small and evolve gradually
• Focus on outcomes
• Create opportunities to collect feedback.
• Dare to discard a solution when it creates no value.
• Collaborate instead of coordinate.
• Judge delivery by the value you’ve created from it
• We want to achieve a balance between discovery and delivery. Excess delivery results in a cluttered product with many features that create no value. Excessive discovery can manifest in analysis paralysis and a failure to place bets.
• Aim for balance, have part of the team invest about 80% of its time into discovery and the rest into delivery, while the rest of the team do the opposite.
• A simple way to get started is by listing and testing key assumptions, and sharing the evidence with your team and stakeholders.

• There are four key elements to product strategy:
1. Product Vision: A compelling vision inspires and motivates the team. Without a sense of purpose, teams get lost because they don’t know what they’re fighting for.
2. Lean-Canvas: can help highlight critical assumptions for testing.
3. Value-Curve: helps you clarify how to differentiate form the competition
• Eliminate → Define what you don’t offer
• Reduce → Select a few attributes to emphasise less
• Raise → Define attributes you want to increase the value
• Create → Start something unavailable in the market
4. Roadmap: The link between delivery and strategy, establishes clarity on what to achieve.
• Provide directions and not instructions.
• Use outcomes not outputs, else you risk forcing the team to implement solutions instead of solving problems.
• Use now, next, later, trash:
• Now → Your focus for one to three months. Don’t commit to initiatives but rather outcomes
• Next → Relevant aspects you might work on after you finish the critical ones.
• Later → We can’t predict 6 months out, so this is whatever you’re considering working on only after you finish Now and Next. Often there’s less evidence for these.
• Trash → what you won’t do, drop ideas unrelated to your strategy.
5. Four steps to craft empowering roadmaps:
• Priority: Agree a high-level direction with leadership (e.g., growth, retention, profitability).
• Future: Clarify which outcomes are needed next. Drop non-essential initiatives.
• Team: Get the product team to craft and commit to goals for the upcoming months
• Agreement: Present roadmap suggestions to leadership for buy-in. Aim for alignment, not overcommitment.
6. Often, your job is to simplify what everyone else is complicating.

• Product discovery helps you learn when you’re wrong and uncovers unforeseeable opportunities to create value.
• The more we think we know, the less we can learn. Our opinions and beliefs can cloud our judgment and stop us from interpreting findings in an open-minded manner.
• The following biases are common in product management. We can mitigate them by having mechanisms that help us drop bad ideas quickly:
• Confirmation bias transforms weak evidence into reasons to build full-blown solutions. Falling in love with a solution is one of the most common traps.
• Commitment Escalation: The more investment we make into something, the more we’re willing to invest.
• Sunk-Cost Fallacy: When a past decision compels further investment. Spend too long prioritising, and you’ll find you really don’t want to drop the winning idea (even if evidence is weak).
• Bandwagon Fallacy: Following others without knowing why.
• Don't focus on the competition: it distracts from customer needs, causes inconsistency, creates technical debt, demotivates employees, and leaves you vulnerable to disruption.
• Focus on ‘Value Drivers’ that create value for customers and the business.
• To uncover the value drivers, you must learn from end users and understand the business. The closer you are to them, the better.

• A strict discovery process doesn’t work, because it’s about the journey not the plan.
• The Discovery journey:
1. Clarify the Goal: Define the ultimate objective to provide clear direction and purpose.
2. Understand Your Audience: Learn what resonates with customers to tailor strategies effectively.
3. Uncover Value Drivers: Story Mapping, Journey Mapping and Opportunity Solution Trees can help you uncover opportunities.
4. Prioritise & Focus: Address one value driver at a time to use resources efficiently and meet goals, avoiding overextension.
5. Deal with Assumptions: Identify and test assumptions by writing them as expected behaviours. Use David J. Bland's assumption matrix to prioritize and test critical assumptions quickly.
6. Use Evidence to Progress: Run experiments to test assumptions, invest in what works, and drop bad ideas based on data. Follow these steps: define methods and success criteria, prepare materials, execute experiments, and evaluate results.
7. Reinvent the Future: Involve the whole team in ideation, exploring multiple solutions to avoid commitment escalation.
• With discovery journey you don’t get stuck with phases → you can go back and forth as much as necessary as you search for value drivers and drop bad ideas.

• Avoid vanity metrics and velocity metrics.
• Teams should identify leading metrics that influence desired lagging metrics. Your backlog should be leading metrics you want to move, not outputs. This helps make the team accountable for outcomes. Concentrate on what you can control.
• Focus on what success looks like and work backward. Define a few metrics and focus on measuring them frequently enough.
• Results alone aren’t enough. They need context. That’s where storytelling comes in handy

• Be on the right side of these:
• Collaboration vs Coordination: Collaboration focuses on adapting quickly, while coordination follows strict processes, limiting flexibility.
• Independent vs Dependent: Dependent teams lack the skills required to transform an idea into value. Independent: Have all the skills required to transform an idea into value. Independent teams deliver value faster.
• Essential points for creating empowered teams:
• Remove dependencies between teams.
• Encourage collaborative flow.
• Implement dual-track agile approach.
• Readiness to embrace the unknown and foster a growth mindset.
• Smaller teams are more productive and align faster, while larger teams face complexity and waste.
• Common Product Management Mistakes. Behaviours on the left indicate the product manager has become more of a backlog manager:
• Writing detailed backlog items vs. uncovering value drivers
• Accelerating output vs. maximising outcomes
• Opinion-driven decisions vs. evidence-driven decisions
• Planning by capacity vs. empowering to pursue goals
• Trying to please everyone vs. building partnerships
• Making compromises to avoid conflicts vs. solving conflicts without compromises
• Product owner is an accountability in Scrum, whereas product manager is a job. The product manager should carry full responsibility from end to end.

• Effective collaboration is more crucial than frameworks, tech stacks, or product strategies.
• Transparent information, sharing progress, and structured meetings sharpen communication.
• Communication and collaboration should balance structure and spontaneity.
• Business stakeholders are partners, not enemies or customers.
• Face-to-face engagement enhances relationship building, though remote collaboration is possible.

• Product principles can accelerate decision making and align team actions.
• Example principles:
• Strategy: Focus on goals, avoid distractions, take risks.
• Discovery: Build to learn, prioritise evidence over opinions.
• Delivery: Measure impact, simplify, accept good enough.
• Collaboration: Align with stakeholders, solve current problems first.

• Run a company health check every six months across the following key aspects:
• Good leaders empower teams, guide rather than command, and take responsibility for failures. Bad leaders make all decisions, control everything, and blame others for failures. Leaders should create spaces where teams can thrive and bring their best selves to work.
• Product teams should be treated as key business members, not a support area. Empowered teams interact directly with customers and determine which problems to solve. Product teams should have a seat on the management team to avoid wasting energy on non-value-creating activities.
• Teams should be able to create value independently without coordinating technical dependencies. Focus on progressing rather than coordinating activities with other teams.
• Risk avoidance stifles innovation; organisations should balance risks and opportunities. Optimistic teams say yes to challenges and transform opportunities into reality, while pessimistic teams default to no and slow down progress. Innovation requires taking risks and embracing small failures to discover outstanding ideas.

• Conduct quarterly health checks to refine product strategy and strengthen it over time.
• Simplify decision-making by holding teams accountable for outcomes rather than outputs.
• Involve product teams in prioritisation to increase commitment and reduce frustration.
• Prioritise progress over extensive analysis to avoid analysis paralysis.
• Set clear, hierarchical goals: product vision, product goal, and development cycle goal.
• Collaboration is more effective than documentation for achieving results.
• Help others understand and align with your product vision to mitigate parallel goal pressure.
• Ensure product strategy enables teams to work independently to maximize value creation.
• A sound product strategy aids in decision-making, while a lack of clarity slows down teams.
• The more teams focus on outcomes and collaborate, the more value they can deliver.

Characteristics of sustainable product delivery:

• Build to learn first, then make it right. Focus on learning first, then scaling.
• Focus on maximising results over features.
• Remove features that don't contribute to value.
• View failures as steps toward success, treat them as learning opportunities
• Fill the backlog based on current goals, not past promises. A cluttered product backlog hinders learning and opportunities. Keep the product backlog focused on future goals.
• Avoid tech debt by starting small and acknowledging unknowns.

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Part I Facing Dangerous Traps

Chapter 1: How Common Ways of Working Trap or Untrap Teams

• Avoid becoming a backlog manager. The focus shouldn’t be on prescriptive roadmaps, timelines, and output commitments.
• If your conditions aren’t ideal, don’t become a victim of your circumstances (complaining & doing nothing about it). Instead - challenge the status quo and begin work on a step-by-step transformation approach. Collaborate with business stakeholders and team members to recognise what’s unnecessarily complex and simplify your work.
• If the company’s vision and strategy aren’t clear - it’s hard to decide what to do with all the ideas. Long backlogs of unrelated ideas end up creating unbearable expectations.
• Remember products exist to serve customers, not business stakeholders. If you’re creating a product you must interact with customers or you risk creating useless products.
• Teams should be empowered to solve hard problems in ways their customers love, yet work for their business. They need to quickly evaluate ideas to discover solutions that work: solutions that are valuable, usable, feasible and viable.
• Empowered teams are the opposite a feature factory. They focus on outcomes and are eager to inspect and adapt continuously. They’re more effective but not trivial to build.
• Two types of product development:
• Coordinative → Energy is focused on organising work and coordinating teams to avoid mistakes and failures, creating rigidity and fear of blame. Agreeing on a plan becomes the goal, as the strategy is unclear.
• The aim is to carry out ideas from beginning to end. The focus on outputs over outcomes, diminishing teams into feature factories. Symptoms of a feature factory include a lack of goals, output obsession, delivering solutions that solve no problem, unclear direction, unwillingness to drop ideas, and inattention to results.
• The longer it takes to deliver value and the more waste you create.
• Coordinative flows unwittingly transform plans into goals.
• In a coordinative development flow, the longer it takes to deliver value and the more waste you create. Coordinative flows unwittingly transform plans into goals.
• Collaborative → Team members collaborate to uncover opportunities and create value for customers and the business. They are flexible in their approach, focusing on driving value. Trust is key, people take responsibility and find solutions when issues arise. Teams start with simple plans, adapt based on evidence, and are guided by an overarching goal to create value.
• The focus is on iterations not phases. Each iteration enhances learning, empowering teams to choose between investing further or dropping the idea. This creates more space to focus on promising ideas.
• You create value sooner and produce less waste. Collaboration helps you adapt plans to reach your goals when reality makes your plan obsolete.

Nine out of ten ideas will fail, our success rate is worse than we can imagine.

• When thinking about your product development approach ask yourself: how fast can you drop bad ideas? The sooner you drop bad ideas, the sooner you can focus on the promising ones. Dropping ideas creates space and freedom. To drop ideas, confront them with your strategy. Use these two sets of questions.
• Filter by: How does it get us closer to our product vision? How does it relate to our product strategy? How does it contribute to our current objectives? How does it deliver on our value proposition?
• For remaining ideas: How much do customers want it? (Desirability) How does the business benefit? (Viability) How well can we deliver it? (Feasibility) How right is doing it? (Ethics)
• Marty Cagan critical risk questions:
• Will the customers buy this or choose to use it? (Value risk)
• Can the user figure out how to use it? (Usability risk)
• Can we build it? (Feasibility risk)
• Does this solution work for our business? (Business viability risk)
• Invest some time in testing the critical assumptions (business critical and weak evidence), and decide which ideas are worth pursuing.
• Don’t over-index on viability and feasibility - just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should do it. Always look for evidence of desirability - proceed only with the ideas that have evidence strong enough to justify the evidence.
• Expect to drop 50% of ideas quickly.
• Use robust experiments to test which solutions can deliver the potential results. Explore a few alternatives and stick with the most promising ones (it’s important not to fall in love with a solution too early.
• After early experimentation you’ll drop 30%-50% of ideas. Customers often show unexpected behaviours. Some ideas don’t justify investment despite being desirable, feasible, and viable at first glance. We experiment to drop solutions that don’t work

Chapter 2: The Mindset Impacts on Dangerous Traps

• A growth mindset shows curiosity and eagerness to learn. A fixed mindset searches for stability and predictability.
• A fixed mindset focuses on using current knowledge to avoid mistakes, resists stepping into the unknown, prioritises following plans, and aims to mitigate risks while avoiding failures. Conversely, a growth mindset views current knowledge as a starting point for new discoveries, embraces curiosity, prioritises progress, seeks to maximise opportunities, accepts small failures as learning experiences, and continuously improves work processes while welcoming change.
• If you fear the unknown, rigidity and planning can act as a protection mechanism.
• Agile Swarming - Reality check survey: How many of these do you see?
• Output over outcome
• Opinions over evidence
• Prescriptive roadmaps over embracing the unknown
• Meeting deadlines over achieving goals
• Implementing solutions over solving problems.

Chapter 3: What Distracts Teams from Creating Value

• Busy with an energy-draining routine? Be a driver, not a passenger. Passengers avoid conflict and accept decisions. Drivers steer towards goals, handle roadblocks, and create value without wasting time.
• Bullshit management is the real enemy. Don’t work on things you can’t seeing creating value. The more bullshit you handle, the less value you create.
• Reflect on your reality - review the points below - how often do they describe your daily reality? Ask your team members and colleagues to do the same.
• Pick one issue at a time and drive the change you want to see.
• Some of the biggest distractions from real product work:
1. Gathering requirements
2. Extensive product backlog
3. Output metrics and obsessing over velocity
4. Consensus-driven decisions
• It’s super slow and waters down ideas
• Move to consent instead
• Establish alignment instead of pleasing everyone.
• Evidence talks louder than opinions.
5. Output approval
• Instead set context → determine what’s important to solve → and what success looks like. Then empower teams to be creative and come up with ideas.
6. Meeting marathons
• Don’t let others drive your agenda.
• Block focus time
• Reject meetings without clear objectives.
7. Fear of saying no
• Say yes recklessly and you’ll become a stakeholder puppet.
• Take control of your destination.
• Help stakeholders understand why their request doesn’t relate to key goals.
• Saying no is much harder without a vision, strategy and goals.
8. Bridging communication
• Don’t limit yourself to being a bridge between tech and business.
• Be a catalyst and foster collaboration.
• Connect your team to stakeholders and customers instead of becoming a bottleneck
9. Opinion-driven decisions
• Don’t let opinions drive your decisions.
• Combine expertise with evidence, they have a higher chance of succeeding faster.
10. Failure avoidance
• Fearing failure typically results in adding more process on the premise that it will help avoid it
• The more processes you have, the less creative your people can be.
• Leaders with a growth mindset foster a learning atmosphere. They may even celebrate failure.
• Aim for a fail-fast culture. A learning attitude lets you adapt your product to what makes sense to customers. It’s like an experimentation mindset:

80 percent of features in the average software product are rarely or never used. Publicly-traded cloud software companies collectively invested up to $29.5 billion developing these features, dollars that could have been spent on higher value features and unrealised customer value. 2019 Feature Adoption Report

Feature report: Generate a report with all features created over the last 12 months. Show how often users interact with them and the value created for them and the business. Chances are high that 50% of features are ignored and drive no value. With such a report, you can ask a powerful question, “Is that the way we should be working? 2019 Feature Adoption Report

Part II Overcoming Dangerous Traps

Chapter: 4 Using the Right Ingredients for Product Teams

• Don’t follow frameworks and process blindly → instead be adaptable and focus on creating value.
• The key ingredients of product management are strategy, discovery and delivery. Without a product strategy, teams struggle to make decisions and become disempowered. Without product discovery, failures will be costly. Product discovery acts as the glue between strategy and delivery.
• Product Strategy: set the direction, create focus
• Product Strategy simplifies decision making by telling us where to focus. It reduces overwhelm and provides a springboard for action.
• Who → Define who you’re serving and who you’re leaving out.
• Why → Give the context while connecting it with your vision.
• What → Define what you envision achieving and name what’s intentionally left out.
• How long → A time frame is necessary to facilitate deciding on suitable options.
• Strategy shouldn’t be set in stone, it needs to evolve. BUT nor should it change every second week.
• A strategy starts as a hunch about what’ll enable you to reach your vision, discovery helps validate what works and what doesn’t.
• Product Discovery: uncover what creates value
• Discovery is about learning and uncovering unknowns. It empowers you to quickly drop ideas that don’t survive a confrontation with reality.
• Product discovery helps you learn what’s valuable (not build it).
• It’s not a phase after strategy and before delivery.
• Product Delivery: build what creates value
• The goal of product delivery is to create outcomes.
• Shipping features at lightning speed isn’t a sign of delivering value, it shows only that they are efficient in creating output.
• Product delivery isn’t about delivering solutions, but rather about driving value.
• Delivery isn’t about following a plan, it’s about confronting reality, learning and adapting.
• Elements of meaningful product delivery:
• Start small and evolve gradually
• Focus on outcomes
• Create opportunities to collect feedback.
• Dare to discard a solution when it creates no value.
• Collaborate instead of coordinate.
• Judge delivery by the value you’ve created from it (not what or how you’ve overseen the process)
• We want to achieve a balance between discovery and delivery. Excess delivery results in a cluttered product with many features that create no value. Excessive discovery can manifest in analysis paralysis and a failure to place bets.
• Aim for balance, have part of the team invest about 80% of its time into discovery and the rest into delivery, while the rest of the team do the opposite. Point the product trio at the future (Pdm, Designer, Tech Lead) and to work on the problem space and uncover value drivers.
• A simple way to get started is by listing and testing key assumptions, and sharing the evidence with your team and stakeholders.

Chapter 5: Crafting a Meaningful Product Strategy

• There are four key elements to product strategy:
1. Product Vision: Set the mission and where to land
2. Lean-Canvas: overview of key elements behind the core
3. Value-Curve: answer how to differentiate from the competition
4. Roadmap: The flue between delivery and strategy
• A products exists to improve people’s lives → you need to identify who you serve.

Take stock of where you’re at in the Product Lifecycle and Product Adoption Cycle.

• The product adoption lifecycle: you need early adopters to fall in love with your product before you can thrive with the early majority.
• The product lifecycle (Vernon 1966) introduced the four stages of a product’s life. Your strategy should be appropriate for your audience and lifecycle stage.
• Introduction: Develop a go-to-market strategy to reach innovators and early adopters, with flexibility for market reactions.
• Growth: Adapt your strategy to increase market share as demand grows, understanding that early adopters differ from the early majority.
• Maturity: Focus on customer retention and consider new products to maintain your user base. Disrupt yourself before competitors do.
• Decline: Expect product relevance to fade due to new market options. Transition smoothly by addressing the maturity phase well, or risk losing to competitors.

• How to create a vision:
1. Speak to leadership with a sense of curiosity, strive to understand their vision and the why behind the product.
2. Talk to customers and observe how the product helps them and why they choose you.
3. Look at competitors in the market and clarify what makes your product unique.
4. Create a draft and invite stakeholder to refine it with you. Iterate a couple of times.
5. Commit to keeping the product vision alive by using it wherever you can.

Lean Canvas: Defining the Key Aspects to Thrive

• A Lean Canvas can help you make decisions on business fundamentals, iterating, learning, and adapting. It shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes to complete, it’s not about creating a bulletproof plan, but rather to have a starting point that accelerates learning.

• When you complete the Lean Canvas, do it in this order and it’ll help you tell the story
• Customer Segments: List the characteristics of your ideal customers and early adopters.
• Problem: Identify the top 3 problems your product or service aims to solve.
• Unique Value Proposition: Provide a single, clear, and compelling message stating why you are different and worth buying.
• Solution: Outline the top 3 features of your solution that address the problems identified.
• Channels: Describe the paths to reach your customers effectively.
• Revenue Streams: List your sources of revenue and your revenue model.
• Cost Structure: List your fixed and variable costs associated with your business.
• Key Metrics: Specify key activities you measure to track the health and success of your business.
• Unfair Advantage: Explain what can't be easily copied or bought, giving you a competitive edge
• You’ll need to iterate on the canvas - go block by clock and ask what your assumptions are. You’ll need to test the most critical ones and collect evidence (hence why the author added an assumptions box!

Value Curve: Designing to Differentiate

• Don’t obsess over the competition, you can’t be a better shadow, but you can be different - so aim to be authentic.
• The Value Curve helps you clarify how you’re differentiated from the competition and how they position themselves.
• If you don’t differentiate then you’re going to end up in price competition.

• Assess 3-4 direct competitors and identify around 7 product attributes. On a scale from 0 to 10 rate how well they cover each attribute. 0 means they don’t have it,10 means they offer the best option.
• Then, it’s your chance to position your product for differentiation. Decide what to…
• Eliminate → Define what you don’t offer
• Reduce → Select a few attributes to emphasise less
• Raise → Define attributes you want to increase the value
• Create → Start something unavailable in the market
• This approach is from ‘The Blue Ocean strategy’ by Renée Mauborgne.

Roadmap: Establishing Clarity on What to Achieve

• Connecting the future with the present is tricky. The product vision may inspire you to act, but you don’t know where to start. The Lean Canvas brings clarity but may lack a tangible starting point. The roadmap is your path from the present to the future.
• Don’t fall into the feature factory trap. Provide directions and not instructions.
• Content evolves as you learn.
• Now → Your focus for one to three months. Don’t commit to initiatives but rather outcomes
• Next → Relevant aspects you might work on after you finish the critical ones.
• Later → We can’t predict 6 months out, so this is whatever you’re considering working on only after you finish Now and Next. Often there’s less evidence for these.
• Don’t use ‘Later’ to avoid conflicts. Instead use the ‘Trash’ column to agree on what you won’t do. Remove irrelevant ideas and save your energy for the promising ones. Drop ideas unrelated to your strategy.
• Four steps to craft empowering roadmaps:
• Priority: Agree a high-level direction with leadership (e.g., growth, retention, profitability).
• Future: Clarify which outcomes are needed next. Drop non-essential initiatives.
• Team: Get the product team to craft and commit to goals for the upcoming months
• Agreement: Present roadmap suggestions to leadership for buy-in. Aim for alignment, not overcommitment.
• Avoid listing and committing to outputs, not outcomes. This approach would force the team to implement solutions instead of solving problems.
• Often, your job is to simplify what everyone else is complicating.

Chapter 6: Forget What You Know to Get Ready for the Unknown

• Product discovery helps you learn when you’re wrong and uncovers unforeseeable opportunities to create value.
• First principles thinking and experience will guide you toward product discovery even if you don’t know what it is.
• Discovery helps us uncover what we don’t know, and create value while dropping flawed ideas.
• Bring bias into the discovery process and you’re vulnerable to a number of traps that could cause you to invest into flawed ideas.
• The more we think we know, the less we can learn. Our opinions and beliefs can cloud our judgment and stop us from interpreting findings in an open-minded manner.
• Questions to ask yourself:
• Are you making further investment because of a previous choice or because this is the best option to progress in the desired direction?
• Am I extending my commitment because I’m already invested or because this path is still worth pursuing?
• Am I doing this because our competitors are doing it or because I learned how that will drive value for customers and the business?
• Am I searching for positive signs to prove myself right, or am I open-minded to learning, even if that proves me wrong?
• The following biases are common in product management. We can mitigate them by having mechanisms that help us drop bad ideas quickly:
• Confirmation bias transforms weak evidence into reasons to build full-blown solutions. Falling in love with a solution is one of the most common traps.
• Commitment Escalation: The more investment we make into something, the more we’re willing to invest.
• Sunk-Cost Fallacy: When a past decision compels further investment. Spend too long prioritising, and you’ll find you really don’t want to drop the winning idea (even if evidence is weak).
• Bandwagon Fallacy: Following others without knowing why.
• Don't focus on the competition: it distracts from customer needs, causes inconsistency, creates technical debt, demotivates employees, and leaves you vulnerable to disruption.
• Focus on ‘Value Drivers’: they create value for customers and the business. They are opportunities (not solutions) you identify that both customers and the business can benefit from. Value drivers have different flavours. They relate to solving a relevant problem, covering a recurrent need, or fulfilling a desire (Teresa Torres calls them opportunities).
• To uncover the value drivers, you must learn from end users and understand the business. The closer you are to them, the better. Your job is to find value drivers and that’s what product discovery is all about.

Chapter 7: Embarking on a Journey to Discover What Matters

• Discovering what creates value requires an open mind and the courage to quickly drop bad ideas.
• A strict discovery process doesn’t work, because it’s about the journey not the plan.
• Use your judgment to decide what to do, when, and for how long.
• The Discovery journey
1. Clarify the Goal: Define the ultimate objective to give clear direction and purpose for the initiatives.
• Example: Without impacting retention, increase the conversion rate by 30%, even if that hurts profitability.
• You need to help stakeholders align on what success looks like ahead of time.
2. Understand Your Audience: Learn what resonates with your customers to tailor your strategies effectively.
3. Uncover Value Drivers: Identify key elements that could drive the desired results in your project or business. Use Story Mapping or Journey Mapping to identify areas of opportunity, cross-reference with discovery learnings. The opportunity solution tree is a good way to structure the value drivers. Set a goal and be clear on how the value drivers relate to it. Write value drivers from your users’ perspective.
4. Prioritise & Focus: Take one value driver at a time to ensure resources are efficiently utilised and goals are met, working on parallel topics stretches the team too thin.
5. Deal with Assumptions: An assumption is something you believe to be truth but as yet don’t have any evidence for it. Identifying and testing assumptions is mandatory. The challenge is to step back and ask questions when everyone wants to jump into implementation. Before investing in solutions identify what you do and do not know.
• How you formulate assumptions is critical → write them as the behaviour you expect to observe. Write as affirmative statements to simplify subsequent experiments.
• Prioritise assumptions by their business importance and evidence strength using David J. Bland's assumption matrix. Focus on testing business-critical assumptions with weak evidence immediately to validate or refute them.
6. Use Evidence to Progress. Once you agree on the critical assumptions, you can explore experiments to accelerate learning. Product experiments test assumptions and prove them right or wrong. Invest in what works and discontinue what doesn’t based on collected data and outcomes. Drop Bad Ideas Fast Enough.
• To simplify running product experiments, follow these steps: define the experiment method and success criteria, prepare necessary materials, execute the experiment with your team to gather insights, and debrief to evaluate results and learn from them.
• Experiments don’t need to be perfect or high-fidelity prototypes. They should give you enough information to justify increasing the investment or convince you to cut it.
7. Reinvent the Future: Get the whole team involved in ideation. Diverge and converge. Explore 3 solutions at once to avoid commitment escalation.
• With discovery journey you don’t get stuck with phases → you can go back and forth as much as necessary as you search for value drivers and drop bad ideas.

“Assumption is the mother of all [f*ck-ups].” —Marion Huwatscheck

• Too optimistic or too pessimistic. Both are dangerous. Extreme optimists assume nothing will go wrong, extreme pessimist think everything will go wrong and so avoids taking any risk.

“Speed of learning is the new unfair advantage.” Ash Maurya, author of Running Lean

Chapter 8: Enabling Product Delivery Beyond Outputs

• Product Backlog: Organising What Drives Value - A meaningful product backlog should emerge from a goal and not become a cluttered wish list. Remove outdated items to make room for relevant entries. Good backlog management requires teamwork, not just the effort of the product manager. Get the trio involved.
• Refinement sessions help build shared understanding through a structured agenda: setting the stage, refining items, and collecting feedback. Avoid over-refining items that are not likely to be worked on soon.
• Alignment: Setting the Next Goal - Set the stage for each cycle, craft memorable goals with the team, and ensure everyone is focused on the strategy to reach them. Make goals digestible and celebrate success when reached.
• Getting It Done - Create value at a steady pace. Definitions of Done (DoD) should be clear to ensure work progresses smoothly, with criteria like code review, test coverage, and compatibility testing. Use simple Jira states.
• Using Tech Debt: Accelerate Learning to Avoid Poor Investment - Tech debt can be a useful tool to accelerate value creation if used prudently. Initial solutions should be limited in scope to identify what works and what doesn’t, allowing for quick adaptation based on user feedback.
• Retro: sessions should be interactive and focused on engaging with customers and stakeholders, not just presenting status reports. Reflecting on how previous outputs drove outcomes helps in making connections that excite stakeholders about results.
• Improve: Teams should strive to become better continuously, with each cycle bringing opportunities for minor improvements that lead to significant results. Running effective retrospectives includes using icebreakers, reviewing actions, and committing to a few targeted improvements.

Additional Considerations:

• Separating discovery from delivery or having rigid workflows can hinder collaboration and lead to a lack of accountability.
• Avoiding excessive management of the product backlog and using tech debt strategically are crucial for maintaining a productive team dynamic.

Refinement usually consumes no more than 10% of the capacity of the Development Team. The Scrum Guide 2017

Chapter 9 Defining and Measuring Actionable Metrics

• Having data just for the sake of it is nonsense.The magic happens when teams can transform data into actionable insights.

1. Data Traps: Avoid vanity metrics and velocity metrics. Velocity doesn’t guarantee business value and is a distraction. Top-of-the-funnel metrics can also be misleading (e.g page views and clicks) and distract from value creation. Instead reflect on the key metrics that bring you closer to driving value.
2. Leading Vs Lagging Metrics. Leading metrics are quick to measure and drive immediate action, while lagging metrics like customer satisfaction and revenue growth, take longer to evaluate and often reveal issues only after the fact. Teams should identify leading metrics that influence desired lagging metrics. To increase customer lifetime value you might focus on key engagement metrics. Your backlog should leading metrics you want to move, not outputs. This helps make the team accountable for outcomes.
3. Input Versus Output Metrics: Focus on input metrics within your control, rather than output metrics. Understanding where you can influence and using leading metrics enables the team to take immediate action and make progress. Concentrate on what you can control.
4. Defining Metrics: Don’t track everything and decide what to use later, you’ll end up in analysis paralysis. Define metrics that enable you to act fast enough. Focus on what success looks like and work backward. Define a few metrics and focus on measuring them frequently enough.
5. Measuring Results: Have dashboards with high-level information, act when key metrics are off. Analyse the same metric in different scenarios, such as conversion rate per device, region, or traffic source, to uncover the root of issues. Examine data from multiple angles to reveal hidden opportunities, starting at a high level and then exploring various perspectives.
6. Sharing Results: Results alone aren’t enough. They need context. That’s where storytelling comes in handy.
• A good story format is: Problem → Spark (why act now) → Solution
• Get people on the same page to get their support. Make context clear and make the message speak to your audience.
• Show what the results mean for the audience, don’t assume people know what you know.
• Scheduled reports, alerts and insights from AI can save you time.

Chapter 10: Getting the Teams Right

“If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.” Ed Catmull

• The two ways of working tradeoffs:
• Collaboration vs Coordination: Collaboration focuses on adapting quickly, while coordination follows strict processes, limiting flexibility.
• Independent vs Dependent: Dependent teams lack the skills required to transform an idea into value. Independent: Have all the skills required to transform an idea into value. Independent teams deliver value faster.
• The four types of teams they create:
• Trapped: Teams heavily dependent on others, hindered by processes or hierarchies, resulting in slow progress and demotivation.
• Empowered-but-Coordinated: Teams with some autonomy but still reliant on coordination, limiting innovation and quick response, leading to frustration.
• Feature Factory: Teams focused on output over value, struggling with alignment and facing rigid processes despite quick feature delivery.
• Empowered: Independent and collaborative teams with decision-making autonomy, resulting in high productivity and innovation, creating outstanding products.
• Independent teams have all skills needed to transform ideas into results, working autonomously without handovers. Advantages of independent teams:
• Accountability: No blame game as teams are responsible for end-to-end results.
• Speed: Simplified communication with no need for handovers.
• Domain knowledge: Continuous enrichment of domain knowledge, leading to faster valuable insights.
• Focus on creating value without needing to prioritise requests from other teams.
• Obstacles to creating empowered teams:
• Moving from output orientation to outcome orientation.
• Feature factory teams focus on fulfilling requests, whereas empowered teams focus on achieving goals.
• Transition from dependent to independent teams can be complicated.
• Essential points for creating empowered teams:
• Remove dependencies between teams.
• Encourage collaborative flow.
• Implement dual-track agile approach.
• Readiness to embrace the unknown and foster a growth mindset.
• Smaller teams are more productive and align faster, while larger teams face complexity and waste.
• Effective product teams require collaboration across roles like product designers, software engineers, and product managers, focusing on desirable, viable, feasible, and ethical ideas without seeking consensus, which can hinder decision-making.
• Common Product Management Mistakes. Behaviours on the left indicate the product manager has become more of a backlog manager:
• Writing detailed backlog items vs. uncovering value drivers
• Accelerating output vs. maximising outcomes
• Opinion-driven decisions vs. evidence-driven decisions
• Planning by capacity vs. empowering to pursue goals
• Trying to please everyone vs. building partnerships
• Making compromises to avoid conflicts vs. solving conflicts without compromises
• Product owner is an accountability in Scrum, whereas product manager is a job. The product manager should carry full responsibility from end to end.
• The coexistence of product owners and product managers creates unnecessary complexity and disappointing results, such as lack of responsibility, poor communication, and increased distance from customers. This dual role setup can lead to blame-shifting, distorted messages, and a focus on feature delivery rather than customer needs.
• The name "product lead" better reflects the role’s focus on leading and empowering teams to create value quickly, rather than managing them.
• When the Agile Coach evolves into Agile Ruler:
• Beware of extremes: Framework obsession vs. finding better ways of working.
• Forcing changes vs. fostering gradual improvement.
• Blocking vs. guiding external collaboration.
• Disputing vs. mentoring product managers.
• Providing answers vs. encouraging questions.
• Defining team processes vs. coaching for growth

Chapter 11: Building Solid Relationships

• Product managers’ thrive on meaningful relationships and collaboration.
• Effective collaboration is more crucial than frameworks, tech stacks, or product strategies.
• Clarify the term "stakeholder" by categorising them into business, customers, users, and externals.
• Use the stakeholder matrix to determine collaboration levels based on power and interest.
• Transparent information, sharing progress, and structured meetings sharpen communication.
• Establish alignment first, don’t focusing on winning arguments; aim for the best product outcome.
• Build relationships through random one-on-one chats, in-person exchanges, and spontaneous interactions.
• Communication and collaboration should balance structure and spontaneity.
• Business stakeholders are partners, not enemies or customers.
• Face-to-face engagement enhances relationship building, though remote collaboration is possible.

Part III Remaining Untrapped

Chapter 12: Establishing Product Principles

• Product principles accelerate decision making and align team actions.
• Crafting product principles involves:
• Reflecting on key questions about your customer, experience, success metrics, quality standards, unfair advantage, and progress.
• Involving product teams and top management in the process.
• Principles simplify decision making. Statements should be objective and reflect desired behaviours.
• Frame them as tradeoffs:
• A over B: Prioritise A over B.
• A even over B: Both are important, but A is prioritised in conflicts.
• A instead of B: Only A is accepted.
• Ensure principles are kept alive by:
• Keeping them active in daily interactions.
• Making their use interactive and fun.
• Regularly assessing their application.
• Evolve principles slowly based on significant changes (e.g. to the customer profile, business model or success metrics).
• Example principles:
• Strategy: Focus on goals, avoid distractions, take risks.
• Discovery: Build to learn, prioritise evidence over opinions.
• Delivery: Measure impact, simplify, accept good enough.
• Collaboration: Align with stakeholders, solve current problems first.
• Aligning with stakeholders means explaining and gaining support for decisions.
• Simplicity is key to unlocking team potential.

Chapter 13: Assessing Your Company’s Dynamics

• Run a company health check every six months across the following key aspects:
• Leadership: Good leaders empower teams, guide rather than command, and take responsibility for failures. Bad leaders make all decisions, control everything, and blame others for failures. Leaders should create spaces where teams can thrive and bring their best selves to work.
• Team Empowerment: Product teams should be treated as key business members, not a support area. Empowered teams interact directly with customers and determine which problems to solve. Product teams should have a seat on the management team to avoid wasting energy on non-value-creating activities.
• Team Topology: Teams should be able to create value independently without coordinating technical dependencies. Focus on progressing rather than coordinating activities with other teams.
• Risk Tolerance: Risk avoidance stifles innovation; organisations should balance risks and opportunities. Optimistic teams say yes to challenges and transform opportunities into reality, while pessimistic teams default to no and slow down progress. Innovation requires taking risks and embracing small failures to discover outstanding ideas.
• Independent teams with a focus on value creation outperform dependent teams.

Chapter 14: Evaluating How Your Product Strategy Implementation Simplifies Decision Making

• Conduct quarterly health checks to refine product strategy and strengthen it over time.
• Simplify decision-making by holding teams accountable for outcomes rather than outputs.
• Involve product teams in prioritisation to increase commitment and reduce frustration.
• Prioritise progress over extensive analysis to avoid analysis paralysis.
• Set clear, hierarchical goals: product vision, product goal, and development cycle goal.
• Collaboration is more effective than documentation for achieving results.
• Help others understand and align with your product vision to mitigate parallel goal pressure.
• Ensure product strategy enables teams to work independently to maximize value creation.
• A sound product strategy aids in decision-making, while a lack of clarity slows down teams.
• The more teams focus on outcomes and collaborate, the more value they can deliver.

Chapter 15: Understanding How Quickly You Can Drop Bad Ideas

• Value Proposition: Ensure clarity to aid decision-making. How helpful is your value proposition for accelerating decisions?
• Customer Interviews: Regular contact with customers is crucial for uncovering unknowns. How often do you collect insights from real customers?
• Identifying Assumptions: Know what you don't know to avoid costly mistakes. How do you identify assumptions behind your value drivers?
• Testing Assumptions: Challenge your biases to confront reality. How fast can you test critical assumptions?
• Experimentation: Test multiple solutions for the same value driver to learn what’s most valuable to customers. How do you identify solutions worth building? Evidence should outweigh opinions in decision-making.

Chapter 16: How fast can you drive customer and business value?

Characteristics of sustainable product delivery:

• Implementation: Build to learn first, then make it right. Focus on learning first, then scaling.
• Measuring Results: Focus on maximising results over features. Measuring outcomes is crucial. Continuously measure results and adapt.
• Feature Removal: Remove features that don't contribute to value. Regularly assess and remove obsolete features. Remove features that no longer create value.
• Facing Failures: View failures as steps toward success. Treat failures as learning opportunities. Failures can lead to better solutions if viewed as learning opportunities.
• Product Backlog: Fill backlog based on current goals, not past promises. A cluttered product backlog hinders learning and opportunities. Keep the product backlog focused on future goals.
• Avoid tech debt by starting small and acknowledging unknowns.