Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

A solid primer on product management – how to figure out what features you should built into your product.

The gist is that you need to concentrate on outcomes, not features. You don’t add features to your product, you really try to achieve outcomes for your company. The running example in the book is an Internet training company that needs to contributors to create video courses. They measure the number of contributors that do it, and it’s low, so they set an OUTCOME goal, then reverse-engineer features to achieve that.

(The “build trap” of the title is the idea that you get trapped in delivering features, even though they might not contribute to any goal.)

Overall, it’s a great book for new product managers to read. It covers everything at just the right altitude.