Outcomes NOT outputs

Melissa Perri’s Escaping the Build Trap articulated so many of the things I have experienced, and have been thinking about, that every page was a light bulb moment. I cannot recommend the book highly enough, but below are a few snippets that especially resonated with me.

Companies that focus on what is easy to measure, like outputs rather than outcomes or sales-led companies where contracts define their product strategy, ended up optimising for throughput and not value. Or as Melissa wrote:

Companies end up in the build trap when they misunderstand value. Instead of associating value with the outcomes they want to create for their businesses and customers, they measure value by the number of things they produce.

And the belief that switching from project to product thinking will save the day, then the “product death cycle is a specific form of the build trap. You are implementing ideas without validating them.”

I am not sure the acronym will catch on, but DIBBs should be front of mind when talking about new ideas, additional functionality, revenue streams, client requests, etc.

DIBBs, which stands for Data, Insights, Beliefs, and Bets. The first three things, data, insight, and beliefs, inform a piece of work called a bet. The concept of thinking of initiatives as bets is powerful because it sets up a different type of expectation.

There is a lot more in the book about how to run experiments to create real customer feedback loops to validate your guesses, for example concierge experiments, but I will leave that for you to discover when you read the book. I will just finish with this:

This is the core of what it means to be customer-centric — to put yourself into your customers’ shoes and ask, “What would make my customers happy and move our business forward?”

In the beginning of this book, we talked about product management being a value exchange. Being customer-centric allows you to figure out what products and services will fulfill that value on the customer side.