You ship feature after feature, your development team works overtime, your backlog is always full—yet customer satisfaction remains flat and business metrics barely budge. Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Most product organizations have fallen into what Melissa Perri calls “the build trap”: the dangerous cycle of equating more features with more success while losing sight of actual customer value.
Most product teams know the pattern: quarterly planning becomes a feature auction where everyone bids for their priorities. Leadership pushes for velocity metrics, sales champions their deal-closing features, and engineering just wants a stable roadmap. The result? Endless debates about what to build, while the fundamental question—whether we should build it at all—goes unasked.
This disconnect between activity and actual progress lies at the heart of what Melissa Perri calls “the build trap.” After years of helping companies transform their product practices as CEO of Produx Labs, she’s seen how organizations become addicted to shipping features while losing sight of customer value. They optimize for output instead of outcomes, mistake motion for progress, and wonder why competitors keep winning despite their “productivity.”
The Core Promise
Perri promises to help product teams break free from the “build trap”, that is, the cycle of churning out features without validating their value. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the “build trap,” cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs.
As a veteran product leader who’s worked with companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500s, Perri brings both strategic insight and tactical experience to the challenge. She’s not just theorizing about good product management, she has been in the trenches helping organizations transform their approach.
The book’s central thesis: “Products and services are not inherently valuable. It’s what they do for the customer or user that has the value—solving a problem, for example, or fulfilling a desire or need.”
Key Concepts
1. The Build Trap
The build trap is when organizations become stuck measuring their success by outputs rather than outcomes. It’s when they focus more on shipping and developing features rather than on actual value those things produce.
This isn’t just about shipping bad features—it’s about fundamentally misunderstanding what creates value. Teams in the build trap celebrate launches instead of impact, count features instead of measuring customer success, and equate being busy with being effective. When companies stop producing real value for the users, they begin to lose market share, allowing them to be disrupted.
For product managers, recognizing the build trap means questioning every feature request with “What outcome will this drive?” instead of immediately jumping to “How can we build this?” It’s the difference between a roadmap full of features and a strategy focused on solving customer problems.
A classic example: A team ships 20 new features in a quarter and celebrates their velocity. But when they check six months later, usage is flat, customer complaints haven’t decreased, and the core metrics haven’t moved. They were building, but not building value.
2. Strategic Intent
Strategic intents combine to communicate where the company is heading and what it desires to achieve when it gets there. The strategic intent points the team toward the outcomes the businesses wants to achieve.
Strategic intents are outcome-oriented goals that take 1-5 years to complete. Strategic Intents are a tool to communicate focus areas. BIG outcome orientated goals - should take 1-5 years to complete. Limit to a few - the goal is to create focus on how to achieve the vision. Unlike traditional roadmaps that lock teams into specific features, strategic intents provide direction while maintaining flexibility in execution.
This concept revolutionizes how product managers communicate strategy. Instead of promising specific features by specific dates, PMs can align teams around outcomes like “Reduce customer onboarding time by 50%” or “Become the preferred solution for enterprise customers.” This gives teams autonomy to discover the best solutions while staying aligned with business goals.
For instance, instead of committing to “build a new dashboard by Q3,” a team might work toward the strategic intent of “Enable customers to understand their usage patterns within 30 seconds.” The team can then experiment with various solutions—maybe a dashboard, maybe email reports, maybe something entirely different—as long as they achieve the outcome.
3. The Product Kata
The Product Kata is the process by which we uncover the right solutions to build. It’s a systematic way that teaches product managers to approach building products from a problem-solving standpoint.
Product managers use a process to identify which of those problems the team can solve to further the business and achieve the strategy. Product managers can rely on the Product Kata to help them develop the right experimental mindset to fall in love with the problem rather than the solution.
The Product Kata consists of four key steps:
- Understand the direction (vision, strategic intent, or product initiative)
- Analyze the current state
- Define the next goal
- Choose which problems to solve
This framework transforms product development from a feature factory into a learning machine. Teams iterate through these steps continuously, building just enough to test their hypotheses and learn what actually moves the needle.
A team applying the Product Kata might start with a strategic intent to “increase user engagement.” They’d analyze current engagement patterns, set a specific goal like “increase daily active users by 20%,” then systematically experiment with different approaches—testing each one before committing to a full build.
4. Product-Led Organization
“The product-lead organization is characterized by a culture that understands and organizes around outcomes over outputs, including a company cadence that revolved around evaluating its strategy in accordance to meeting outcomes.”
A product-led organization isn’t just about having product managers—it’s about fundamentally restructuring how the company operates. “A product led organization is characterized by a culture that organizes outcomes over outputs, including a company cadence that revolves around evaluating strategies in accordance with meeting outcomes.”
For product managers, this means having a seat at the strategy table, not just taking orders from above. It means the ability to say no to features that don’t align with outcomes, the autonomy to experiment and learn, and the responsibility to connect product work directly to business results.
In practice, this looks like quarterly reviews focused on outcome progress rather than feature delivery, budgets allocated to learning and experimentation rather than predetermined projects, and success metrics based on customer value rather than velocity metrics.
What Makes This Different
Unlike many product management books that focus on frameworks and processes in isolation, Perri addresses the entire organizational system. She doesn’t just tell you how to be a better product manager—she explains why your current organizational structure might be preventing good product management from happening at all.
How she incorporates other valuable frameworks, in particular Stephen Bungay’s “effects gap” framework to explain how strategic plans usually fail—this integration of military strategy concepts into product management is particularly novel. While other books might say “be strategic,” Perri explains the specific gaps between strategy and execution that cause failure.
The book challenges the sacred cow of the product roadmap itself. While most product literature treats roadmaps as essential, Perri argues they’re often counterproductive when filled with feature commitments. Instead, she advocates for outcome-based planning that maintains flexibility while providing direction.
Her Product Kata framework adapts Toyota’s continuous improvement methodology specifically for product development. This isn’t just another agile methodology—it’s a fundamental shift in how teams approach problem-solving, emphasizing learning over delivery.
Honest Assessment
The book’s main shortcoming is its assumption that organizations are ready and willing to make fundamental changes. Perri writes from the perspective of someone who is often brought in specifically to drive transformation, but many product managers work in companies that aren’t actively seeking this level of change. The strategies she outlines require significant buy-in from leadership, which is not something not every PM can secure.
Readers need substantial product management experience to fully grasp and implement these concepts. This isn’t an entry-level book. If you’re new to product management, you’ll need familiarity with basic concepts like OKRs, user research methods, and agile development practices. Without this foundation, some of the nuanced discussions about organizational change will feel abstract.
While Perri promises a complete framework for escaping the build trap, the book is lighter on the “how” of certain critical elements. For instance, she emphasizes the importance of continuous experimentation but doesn’t provide detailed guidance on designing and running effective product experiments. Similarly, the section on influencing organizational change could use more tactical advice for product managers without executive authority.
The reality check: These strategies work best in growth-stage or enterprise software companies with dedicated product teams. If you’re the sole product person at a small startup, wearing multiple hats and fighting fires, the full Product Kata process might feel overwhelming. Similarly, if you’re in a heavily regulated industry or hardware company with long development cycles, the rapid experimentation approach needs significant adaptation.
Practical Applications
• Implement the Product Kata in your next sprint planning Start your next planning session by explicitly stating the strategic intent you’re working toward. Before discussing any features, have the team analyze the current state with data and identify the key problems blocking progress toward your goal.
• Reframe your roadmap conversations Next time stakeholders ask for your roadmap, present strategic intents and success metrics instead of a feature list. Explain what outcomes you’re driving toward and how you’ll measure success, keeping solution details flexible.
• Create a learning backlog alongside your feature backlog For every major feature request, document what you need to learn before committing to build it. Prioritize these learning activities in your sprints, treating research and experimentation as first-class deliverables.
• Institute problem validation checkpoints Before any feature moves to development, require evidence that it solves a validated problem. Create a simple template: What problem does this solve? For whom? How do we know it’s a real problem? What evidence do we have that our solution will work?
• Start measuring outcomes, not outputs Pick one key feature your team recently shipped. Instead of celebrating the launch, define and track the outcome it was supposed to drive. Share these results with your team and stakeholders, making outcome measurement a regular practice.
Who Should Read This
Primary audience: Mid-level to senior product managers at B2B SaaS companies who feel stuck in feature factory mode. You have 3+ years of experience, understand basic product practices, but struggle with strategic influence and organizational resistance to outcome-focused work. You work in companies with 50+ employees where product management exists but isn’t yet driving strategy.
Secondary audiences:
- VPs of Product or Chief Product Officers looking to transform their organizations and need a proven framework to reference
- Engineering leaders who want to understand modern product management and build better partnerships with product teams
- Startup founders transitioning from founder-led product decisions to building a proper product organization
Who should skip it:
- Complete beginners to product management—you need foundational knowledge first
- Product managers in agencies or consulting firms where you don’t own long-term outcomes
- Anyone looking for a quick fix or template-based solutions—this is about organizational transformation, not tactics
- Hardware product managers where rapid experimentation isn’t feasible due to manufacturing constraints
The Verdict
“Escaping the Build Trap” succeeds at diagnosing why so many product organizations struggle and provides a comprehensive framework for transformation. Perri doesn’t just identify the problem, she provides a complete system for building a product-led organization. The book’s greatest strength lies in connecting product management practices to organizational design and strategy, showing how they must evolve together.
Within the product management canon, this book sits alongside Marty Cagan’s “Inspired” as essential reading for product leaders. While Cagan focuses on empowered product teams and discovery techniques, Perri addresses the organizational context that enables or prevents good product management. Together, they form a powerful foundation. This is definitely a “keep on your desk” resource—you’ll return to it whenever you need to advocate for organizational change or refine your product processes.
I recommend prioritizing this book if you’re feeling stuck in a feature factory, especially if you have some influence over process and culture. The ideal time to read it is when you’re moving into a senior PM or product leadership role where you can actually implement these changes. However, even junior PMs will benefit from understanding what good looks like, though they may need to file away some ideas for future use.
The build trap is real, pervasive, and career-limiting for product managers. But as Perri demonstrates, it’s not inevitable. With the right mindset, frameworks, and organizational support, product teams can escape the trap and start delivering real value. The question isn’t whether your organization needs this transformation—it’s whether you’re ready to lead it.