Olivia: Your company's busiest, most 'productive' team might actually be its most dysfunctional. The team that ships feature after feature, constantly hitting deadlines? They could be the very reason your business is failing. We're going to talk about why. Jackson: Whoa, that's a bold start. You're saying the star players are actually tanking the whole season? Because I've definitely worked on teams that felt like that—a blur of activity, constant launches, but six months later you look back and wonder, "Did any of that actually matter?" Olivia: That's the exact feeling. And that paradox is the heart of a really influential book in the tech world: Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri. Jackson: Right, and Perri is a big deal in this space. She's not just an author; she's taught at Harvard Business School and basically built a whole educational system around fixing this exact problem in companies from startups to Fortune 500s. Olivia: Exactly. Her consulting work gave her a front-row seat to this widespread corporate sickness. She saw companies burning millions of dollars and mountains of talent by building stuff nobody wanted. And she wrote this book as a practical, no-nonsense guide to get out. Jackson: A corporate detox plan. I'm in. So what is this "Build Trap"? It sounds like a corporate horror movie.

Olivia: It kind of is! The Build Trap is what happens when a company becomes addicted to measuring progress by its output, not its outcome. They measure success by the number of features they ship, the velocity of their development teams, how many lines of code they write. Jackson: It’s the hamster wheel. You're running really fast, you feel incredibly productive, the wheel is spinning, but you're not actually going anywhere. Olivia: That's a perfect analogy. You're busy, but you're not creating value. Perri uses a fictional company throughout the book called Marquetly to illustrate this. It's an online education company that's growing fast, they adopt all the trendy agile methodologies like Scrum, and they start hiring product managers. Jackson: Sounds like they're doing everything right on paper. Olivia: On paper, yes. But in reality, they fall headfirst into the trap. The sales team starts promising custom features to big enterprise clients just to close deals. The product managers, who are mostly former marketers without real product training, are just taking orders. The VP of Product, Karen, is completely overwhelmed. She tells Perri, "I am under a ridiculous amount of pressure... I have 20 direct reports and a bunch of deadlines to hit. I have no time to be strategic at all." Jackson: Oh, I know that meeting. I've been in that meeting. Everyone is pointing fingers. Sales blames product for not having a roadmap, product blames sales for overpromising, and the engineers are just sitting there saying, "Just tell us what to build!" Olivia: Precisely. The CTO at Marquetly literally says, "If only our product managers had deeper backlogs. We need them to start thinking of more solutions." He's asking for more outputs. More features. More stuff to build. He doesn't realize the problem isn't a lack of ideas; it's a lack of a coherent strategy and a total disconnect from what customers actually need. Jackson: That's fascinating. It's like everyone is working incredibly hard, but they're all pulling the rope in different directions. Perri mentions some specific "bad product manager archetypes" that contribute to this. What are they? I need to know if I've worked with them... or if I've been one. Olivia: Oh, you've definitely worked with them. The first is 'The Waiter.' This is the product manager who just goes around to stakeholders and customers with a notepad and asks, "What do you want?" They collect a list of feature requests and bring it back to the team. There's no strategy, no pushback, no digging for the underlying problem. The loudest or most powerful person gets their feature built. Jackson: It's product management as a short-order cook. "You want a button here? Coming right up! You want an integration there? You got it!" It's easy, but it leads to a Frankenstein's monster of a product. Olivia: Exactly. Then there's the 'Mini-CEO.' This one is almost the opposite. They've read a blog post that says product managers are the CEO of the product, and they take it way too literally. They come in with all the answers, dictate solutions to the engineering and design teams, and ignore any data that contradicts their "vision." Jackson: That sounds insufferable. They have all the authority of a CEO but none of the actual power, so they just alienate everyone. Olivia: And they fail to harness the collective intelligence of their team. The book tells a great story about a young PM named Nick who acts like this, and his team just resents him because he's not collaborative. A great product manager knows they don't have all the answers. Their job is to facilitate the process of finding the answers. Jackson: Okay, I'm convinced. My company is 100% in the Build Trap, and I've probably been a 'Waiter' on my bad days. So how do we get out? Is there a magic wand?

Olivia: No magic wand, unfortunately. Perri is clear that escaping requires a fundamental shift in the entire organization's mindset. It's about becoming "product-led." This isn't just a new process; it's a whole new philosophy. It starts with strategy. Jackson: But "strategy" is one of those words that gets thrown around in boardrooms and means nothing. It's just a 50-slide PowerPoint deck that nobody reads. Olivia: And that's the misconception Perri attacks. She argues a good strategy is not a detailed plan. It's a deployable decision-making framework. It's a simple, guiding policy that helps everyone in the company make choices. She uses Netflix as a prime example. After they won the battle against Blockbuster, Reed Hastings realized all their side projects and distractions didn't help them win. He said, "Executing better on the core mission is the way to win." Jackson: So the strategy wasn't a list of 100 features to build. It was a simple rule: "Does this help us deliver entertainment better?" Olivia: Exactly. And once you have that clear strategic direction—the "why"—the next step is to change how you work. You have to embrace experimentation to figure out the "what" and the "how." This is where the most powerful stories in the book come in. Jackson: Let me guess, this is where the famous Zappos story comes in? Olivia: It is, and it's a perfect example of what Perri calls a 'Wizard of Oz' experiment. In the late 90s, the founder, Nick Swinmurn, had a hypothesis: people would buy shoes online. But building a website with a full inventory system and warehouse was a massive, expensive risk. Jackson: Right, you could spend millions and find out nobody wants to buy shoes without trying them on first. Olivia: So, what did he do? He created a simple website with pictures of shoes from a local shoe store. When someone placed an order, he would get an alert, physically walk to the store, buy the shoes at full retail price, go to UPS, and mail them to the customer. Jackson: Wait, he just... went to Sears? That's brilliant! The customer sees a fully functional e-commerce store, but behind the curtain, it's just one guy running around. The Wizard of Oz. Olivia: Precisely. He wasn't building to earn; he was experimenting to learn. He validated the single most important assumption—will people buy shoes online?—with almost zero upfront investment. He proved the demand was real before he built the complex infrastructure. That's the essence of escaping the build trap. You test your riskiest assumptions in the cheapest, fastest way possible. Jackson: That's an amazing story for a startup. But how does a big, established company do that? Can a bank or an insurance company really do a 'Wizard of Oz' experiment? And more importantly, how do you create the safety for teams to even try something like that? In most companies, if you try something and it "fails," it's a black mark on your performance review. Olivia: That's the final, and hardest, piece of the puzzle: organizational change. Perri tells the heartbreaking story of Kodak to show that even if you have the right ideas, the organization can still kill them. In 2007, her team at Cornell was working with Kodak. They did the research and told Kodak's management, "The iPhone is going to be huge. You need to integrate your camera technology into phones. People want to edit their photos and share them online." Jackson: They basically predicted Instagram. In 2007! Olivia: They did. And what did Kodak's management say? "Great idea. But it's not in this year's budget. We'll need to form a new team for that next year." They were stuck in a rigid, output-focused system. They couldn't react. And we all know what happened next. Kodak filed for bankruptcy a few years later. Jackson: Wow. So the problem wasn't a lack of innovation, it was a lack of an organization that could act on innovation. Olivia: Exactly. And that's why Perri says you have to change the policies and rewards. If you reward people for shipping features on time, you'll get a lot of features shipped on time, whether they're valuable or not. If you want to escape the build trap, you have to start rewarding people for achieving outcomes. Reward them for learning about users. Reward them for killing a bad idea before it wastes six months of engineering time. Reward them for moving a business metric, not for checking a box on a project plan.

Jackson: It seems like the 'Build Trap' isn't really a process problem, is it? It's a culture and leadership problem. You can have all the right tools—agile, scrum, whatever—but if the organization rewards the wrong things and doesn't provide a clear 'why,' you're still just a hamster on a wheel. Olivia: That's the core insight of the entire book. Becoming 'product-led' is an organizational transformation, not a new checklist for your product managers. It starts with leadership defining a clear, compelling strategy—the 'why'—and then empowering their teams with the safety and autonomy to figure out the 'what' and 'how' through relentless experimentation. Jackson: So for someone listening right now, maybe a product manager or an engineer who feels that hamster wheel spinning, what's the one question they should ask in their next team meeting to see if they're in the trap? Olivia: I love that question. Perri would say to ask this: "How will we know this feature we're building is successful?" If the answer is, "Because we shipped it on time and under budget," you are deep in the Build Trap. Jackson: And what's the answer that gives you hope? Olivia: If the answer is, "Because we believe it will increase our user retention by 10%," or "Because it will solve this specific, painful problem for our customers, and we'll measure that with a satisfaction survey." If the answer is tied to a measurable customer or business outcome, you might just be on the path to escaping. Jackson: That is such a clear and powerful litmus test. We'd love to hear from our listeners. What are the signs of the Build Trap you see in your own work? Or have you seen a team successfully escape it? Join the conversation on our social channels. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.