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  • Escaping the Build Trap

  • How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value
  • Written by: Melissa Perri
  • Narrated by: Erin deWard
  • Length: 6 hrs and 44 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (38 ratings)

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Escaping the Build Trap cover art

Escaping the Build Trap

Written by: Melissa Perri
Narrated by: Erin deWard
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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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    2 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

There are much better product management books

Lacks original ideas. The natation is awful. There are zero real case studies, instead everything is based around a fictional company where the author is the hero consultant with all the answers.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Incredible resource

A very enjoyable read filled with actionable, tactical information. Highly recommend for those getting into product management.

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  • Heather Henderson
  • 2021-01-21

Distractingly soft narration

The narrator's voice is suited to bedtime stories for children, not business advice. I had a hard time focusing on the content of the book her voice was so soft and saccharine. I just couldn't take the book seriously.

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4 people found this helpful

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  • Girevik
  • 2021-07-08

Terrible narration

Great content. The worst and most annoying narrator for a non fiction book. You don’t need to change your voice for every piece of dialogue.

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3 people found this helpful

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  • Tennis Apprentice
  • 2021-05-17

Odd narration practice

I am enjoying the content of this book and it seems to be valuable and on point. However the narrator’s practice of altering her voice to sound deeper and gruffer when quoting men is really distracting. Imagine if a male narrator put on a higher pitched voice to indicate he was quoting a woman…he’d be labelled sexist! It detracts from the quotes themselves.

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3 people found this helpful

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  • Amy
  • 2021-03-20

Why so condescending?

I loved the content and it made a lot of sense. Why were the male characters portrayed as stupid with the condescending voice-over? Likewise, the female characters were unfairly portrayed as weak. Not sure if that was the books intent but the reading was bad in my opinion.

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  • Anonymous User
  • 2021-10-15

Please have a different voice over

The content itself is great but the voice is really really bad. I had a hard to finish, this is not a bedtime story. I ended up buying the book itself to read.

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2 people found this helpful

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  • Lassi*aL
  • 2021-02-23

Good insights, inappropriate delivery

The story is well crafted but I was much distracted by over acting of the reader making it not sound like a business book but fiction.

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  • Russ McClelland
  • 2023-04-02

Great but Annoying…

The content was great. I found a lot I agreed with, some I didn’t but worth contemplating. Like all things, take these tools and add them to your tool box.

However, the narrator should not be reading books like this. It felt like I was being a read a fairy tale by my grandmother. I almost didn’t finish the book. The tone, inflections, and emphasis was distracting to the point that it inhibited uptake.

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  • The Fig of Newtons
  • 2022-03-13

Great Read, Terrible Listen

If you're a software product manager, owner, or executive buy this book but listen to the sample before you buy the audiobook.

Why this publisher chose deWard whose history appears to be primarily narrating erotica is beyond me. And don't take that to mean her reading style is attractive, it's just incredibly irksome after about 6 minutes. It may just be that it triggered me too much as an ex-mormon as her style matches women that speak in "general conference".

Anyhow if you're stuck in an output focused feature factory, get this, but get the book, not the audio book.

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1 person found this helpful

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    3 out of 5 stars
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  • Andre Robitaille
  • 2021-12-28

Business novel writing + romance novel narration

The insight is strong, especially in the first 10 or so chapters, but then starts to drone on in the typical business half-novel sort of way. Any time you hear the fake "Marketly" company name, skip ahead 15-30 seconds. That's if you're lucky. If there's a lot of Marketly fictional character dialogue, then you're about to dive into 60+ seconds of the narrator's romance novel voices.

Even the standard reading of the non-fictional portions are read like a low-quality fiction book.

I'll just say this. I went out and bought the regular book anyway, partially to skip the fluff, but mostly because the narration was that bad.

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  • kirschi
  • 2020-09-15

A comprehensive tour to being a tech product manager

Tech products are complex beasts invented by humans. They require an operating system that can react quickly and nimbly and yet remain focused on a strategic vision.
As such, a product manager (or product owner in an agile development setting) is one of the hardest and most important roles to succeed as a product led organization.
This book provides a comprehensive guided tour for the PM role, from understanding what is a product led organization, how to enable product teams turn a product vision and strategy into viable options, through how to shape a product led organization in a structure set up for success. By structure I mean not only org structure but also roles, artifacts, flow and emergence of knowledge and more.
The book, imho, falls short on two aspects:
- the linkage between organizational agility and a product led organization. There are some examples of how poor agile practices hinder a mindset of a product led organization. But not how real agility is key to turning concept to cash quickly and effectively.
- the description of required meetings and procedures in the third part feels over prescriptive. Maybe Perri meant them as an example. I understood them as how it should work.
To me it feels that the excellent explanations and examples for utilizing experimentation in the product management concepts are missing on these aspects of a product led organization.
That being said, the book gets an easy 5 star rating from me as one of the best books on PM I have read/listened to.

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  • spjeanfritz
  • 2022-07-04

A must read for product manager

You can't call yourself a product manager until you read this book. Makes you realize where you are at and how to transition into being outcome oriented with concise principle and brilliant stories

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  • QuickBen
  • 2021-07-30

Good stuff

Great content. I found the narration a bit too theatrical for my taste. Ended up listening at 1.3x speed.

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