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ProductStrategy

Escaping the Build Trap

Melissa Perri

1st ed.

Shipping features isn't the same as creating value. A feature factory can ship every sprint and still be building the wrong thing.

About the book

Melissa Perri names the trap most product orgs fall into: measuring success by output (features shipped, roadmap items closed) instead of outcome (customer and business value actually created). Her fix runs from the individual product manager's role up through product strategy and a value-exchange model connecting customer problems to product to customer value to business value, operationalized through outcome-based roadmaps — Now/Next/Later bets with kill criteria — instead of a fixed feature list nobody's allowed to question.

Best used for

  • —Auditing a roadmap for whether it's a list of features or a set of outcomes with kill criteria
  • —Diagnosing whether an org is a feature factory before proposing a product strategy fix
  • —Evaluating a PRD or strategy doc against Perri's value-exchange model instead of a feature checklist

“The best book on product-management I've read so far, and one that I will recommend first to any product manager.”

— Mindaugas Mozūras, Goodreads

Install this skill

Run this command in your terminal. The skill will be available in all your Claude Code projects.

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/escaping-build-trap && curl -fsSL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vikast908/Awesome-Product-Skills/main/escaping-build-trap/SKILL.md" -o ~/.claude/skills/escaping-build-trap/SKILL.md

Once installed, invoke with /escaping-build-trap in Claude Code, or let Claude load it automatically when relevant.

Skill by vikast908/Awesome-Product-Skills, licensed MIT.