I read Escaping the Build Trap.
An introductory book on product management by Melissa Perri.
The "build trap" in the title describes the state where "shipping more features" becomes the goal in itself, drifting away from delivering value to customers. The book organizes how to escape this trap across four axes: organization, role, strategy, and process.
Structure:
- Part I "The Build Trap": value exchange systems, product-led organizations contrasted with sales-led / visionary-led / technology-led ones
- Part II "The Role of the Product Manager": archetypes of bad PMs (mini CEO, waiter, former project manager), what a good PM looks like, and the career path
- Part III "Strategy": strategy gaps (knowledge / alignment / effects), strategy deployment and creation, vision and strategic intent
- Part IV "The Product Management Process": the Product Kata, metrics (Pirate Metrics, HEART), problem exploration, solution exploration, and building/optimizing
- Part V "The Product-Led Organization": outcome-oriented communication, compensation, budgeting, and customer-centricity
What stood out:
- The framing itself — "build trap" — is sharp. It captures, in a single phrase, a pattern that mature organizations slide into: repeatedly "just shipping things" while drifting away from delivering value. Just having a name for that structure is enough to align the starting point of a discussion.
- The "bad PM archetypes" chapter is approachable. It helps you put words to which failure pattern your team or yourself is leaning toward.
- Strategy is portrayed not as a finished artifact handed down from the top, but as the ongoing work of closing gaps at each layer.
- The Product Kata loop (understand current state → set goals → explore problems → explore solutions → build) is easy to bring into day-to-day product discussions.
For engineers, this is also useful for raising your resolution on what PMs actually do and where they struggle. For anyone involved with a product, reading this as shared vocabulary across PM, engineering, design, and management makes those conversations mesh better.
