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  • Escaping the Build Trap

  • How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value
  • By: Melissa Perri
  • Narrated by: Erin deWard
  • Length: 6 hrs and 44 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (36 ratings)

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Escaping the Build Trap cover art

Escaping the Build Trap

By: Melissa Perri
Narrated by: Erin deWard
Free with 30-day trial

$16.45/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

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Publisher's Summary

To stay competitive in today's market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. 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.

In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You'll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small.

In five parts, this book explores:

  • Why organizations ship features rather than cultivate the value those features represent
  • How to set up a product organization that scales
  • How product strategy connects a company's vision and economic outcomes back to the product activities
  • How to identify and pursue the right opportunities for producing value through an iterative product framework
  • How to build a culture focused on successful outcomes over outputs 

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 Melissa Perri (P)2020 Tantor

What listeners say about Escaping the Build Trap

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A must read for product companies!

If you are in the product business, regardless of the level of your role, you must read this book. We read it as a team in our book club at my company, with all the product managers, experience designers and our leaders. It’s been a game changer! Can’t recommend it enough.

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Great read for product managers at any level

Melissa uses a fictional company to illustrate how a company can scape de "build trap" (build a list of features instead of solving problems, output Vs outcomes), via a product Kata (continuous improvements via experiments), becoming a product-led organisation. A book to read and revisit many times.

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Great book, terrible narrator

This book is essential reading for Product Managers, but Melissa should have done the read. This narrator can be tolerable or even good in fiction, but it was a real struggle to listen to her reading this.

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Great content. Great narrator. Highly recommended

Very likely my favourite product management book so far — it really lives up to the hype! It's relatable, practical and I just couldn't put it down.

Special shout out to the narrator too. She did a fantastic job!

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  • KJ
  • 08-09-2021

mind-blowing product reality for any PM

Insightful for any PM at any stage. it gives you insight into the mind of leading worldclass PM and problems faced at organizations and how to navigate them.

absolutely loved it and will buy a hard copy.

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Great struggle summary

Great summary of the struggles vast majority of companies go through when trying to be agile, customer centric and product led.. driven bottom up, with no exec support and/or understanding.

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Ok but narration is not great.

A lot of the information in this audiobook is useful. However, the narrator puts on voices when quoting other people which are just not nice or necessary (and in some cases are just derogatory). Makes some of the reconstructed conversations very hard to listen to.

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