FrameworkLessonProductLeadership
Shipping is an output. Nobody is paying for outputs
Melissa Perri · Escaping the Build Trap
The idea
Perri's build trap is an organisation that measures how much it ships rather than what changed for the customer or the business. Features become the goal, roadmaps become promises, and teams are judged on delivery of things nobody checked were wanted. The escape is structural: teams given an outcome to move, a metric and the authority to decide how, rather than a list of features to build. The distinction matters in an interview because it is the one most candidates cannot articulate: the difference between being handed a roadmap and being handed a problem.
Measure what changed for the customer, not what was shipped; a team given an outcome behaves differently from one given a list.
When it works
Product interviews at large companies, metrics questions, and any discussion of how a team should be judged.
When it may fail
Outcomes can be gamed as proxies, which is the Bezos warning, and some work, compliance, infrastructure, is genuinely an output. The frame is for product teams, not for everything.
How to use it
Build the metrics tree in the lab for a product you use, and put the outcome at the top rather than a feature. Then say which single metric you would give a team and what you would let them decide to move it.
Where it came from
Book Escaping the Build Trap · Melissa Perri
What the source says. Why organisations measure how much they ship instead of what changed, and what has to be true structurally for that to stop.
Connected ideas
Says something similar
Day 2 begins when a company manages to proxies and treats decisions as one-way doorsCheck whether the metric is still the goal or has become the goal, and reserve the heavy process for decisions that cannot be undone.
Says something similar
Ask about what people already did, never about what they would doEvidence about demand comes from what people have already done and paid for, not from what they say they would do.
Puts it to work
A metrics question is a structured hunt: north star, guardrails, then the segmentClarify the metric, protect the guardrails, then decompose the drop by segment until it is isolated; show the process, not a guess.
Concepts
Put it to work on L3VLUP
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