You’re shipping. Every two weeks, the demo looks great. The burndown chart is a beautiful, descending slope of "productivity." But the revenue hasn’t moved. The churn rate is still creeping up like a slow-motion car crash, and your customers are louder and angrier than they were six months ago. Sound familiar? You’re stuck. Honestly, most companies are. This is the reality of escaping the build trap, a concept Melissa Perri popularized that has become the definitive diagnosis for the "feature factory" sickness.
It’s a cycle of doom. The business measures success by how much stuff gets pushed to production rather than whether that stuff actually solved a problem. It’s the difference between outputs and outcomes. Most leadership teams are addicted to the "output" drug because it's easy to count. You can count a feature. You can't always easily measure the nuance of a behavioral shift in a user.
What Is the Build Trap, Really?
Basically, the build trap happens when an organization becomes so focused on the "how" and the "when" of shipping that they forget the "why." You see it in companies that treat their product development like a linear manufacturing line. Step one: CEO has a "visionary" idea. Step two: Design makes it pretty. Step three: Engineering builds it. Step four: It flops.
Then they do it again.
🔗 Read more: Henry County Human Resources: What Most People Get Wrong About Local Government Jobs
The core issue here is a fundamental misunderstanding of value. In a healthy product organization, value is an exchange. The customer gets a problem solved, and the business gets money or data in return. In the build trap, the "value" is just the deployment notification in Slack. It’s an internal-facing metric that has almost nothing to do with the market.
Real success isn't a checklist. It's a change in user behavior. If you build a new dashboard and nobody clicks it, you didn't succeed; you just added technical debt.
The Messy Reality of Escaping the Build Trap
If you want to start escaping the build trap, you have to stop looking at your roadmap as a promise of features. It’s a promise of problems you intend to solve. This is a massive cultural shift that usually makes stakeholders very, very nervous. They want to know "When will X be done?" and you have to be brave enough to ask "Why are we doing X at all?"
Take a look at companies like Netflix or Slack. They don't just throw things at the wall. They use a product-led strategy. This isn't just buzzword bingo. It means their strategy is a system of achievable goals and intentions that pull the company toward a specific vision. If you don't have a strategy, you have a "plan." Plans are rigid. Strategies are adaptable.
Why Good Product Managers Get Stuck
It’s rarely the PM’s fault alone. They are often stuck in a "Project Manager" role masquerading as a "Product Manager." If your day is spent just managing JIRA tickets and making sure developers have enough work to do, you aren’t managing a product. You’re managing a schedule.
💡 You might also like: Marsh & McLennan Companies Stock: What Most People Get Wrong
Expert PMs like John Cutler often talk about the "feature factory" as a byproduct of low trust. When leadership doesn't trust the product team to find the right solutions, they just hand them a list of requirements. This effectively turns the engineering team into an expensive version of an order-taker at a drive-thru.
- The Output Obsession: Measuring story points instead of churn reduction.
- The Lack of Vision: No clear "North Star" metric to guide decisions.
- The "One More Feature" Fallacy: Believing that the next feature will be the magic bullet that saves the product.
The Role of Strategy in the Escape
Strategy isn't a 50-page PowerPoint deck that sits in a Google Drive folder gathering digital dust. Strategy is a living framework. To get out of the trap, you need to connect the business goals to the user's needs. Melissa Perri’s "Product Kata" is a great way to think about this. It’s a scientific approach.
- What is the goal?
- Where are we now?
- What is the biggest obstacle?
- What’s the next small step to learn more?
It’s about learning. If you can learn faster than your competitors, you win. If you just build faster, you might just be running toward a cliff.
How to Actually Pivot Toward Outcomes
Stop building for a second. Seriously. Look at your data.
Most companies have way too much data and almost zero insight. You need to identify your "Product North Star." This isn't "Revenue." Revenue is a lagging indicator—it tells you what happened in the past. You need a leading indicator. For Slack, it might be the number of messages sent within a team. For an e-commerce site, it might be the "add to cart" rate for first-time visitors.
Once you have that, every single feature on your roadmap has to justify its existence based on that metric. If a stakeholder asks for a "Dark Mode" but your North Star is "User Retention" and there's no evidence dark mode keeps people around, it goes to the bottom of the pile.
Radical Transparency with Stakeholders
You have to manage up. You can't just say "no" to the CEO. You have to show them the trade-offs. Use a "Now, Next, Later" roadmap instead of a calendar-based one. Calendar roadmaps are lies. Everyone knows they’re lies, but we all pretend they aren’t. A "Now, Next, Later" roadmap focuses on themes and problems.
It tells the story of what you are trying to achieve, not just when a button will turn blue.
Case Study: The "Big Bang" Failure
Let's talk about a real-world example (names changed for the usual reasons). A mid-sized SaaS company spent 14 months rebuilding their entire platform from scratch. They called it "Project Phoenix." They didn't talk to customers during the build because they "already knew what was wrong."
When they launched, it was a disaster.
The users hated the new UI. Critical workflows were broken. The "build trap" here was the assumption that more tech equals more value. They spent millions of dollars to move backwards. If they had used an iterative approach—escaping the build trap by testing small chunks of the new platform with real users—they would have realized the UI was confusing within month two.
Practical Steps to Start Today
You don’t need to fire your whole team or hire an expensive consultant to start escaping the build trap. You can start small.
- Audit your current roadmap. For every item, ask: "What happens if we don't build this?" If the answer is "nothing," delete it.
- Talk to five customers. Not about features they want, but about their day-to-day frustrations. What are they trying to achieve when they open your app?
- Change your meeting structure. Instead of "Status Updates," have "Learning Updates." What did we learn this week that changed our mind about a feature?
- Define success before you build. Write down exactly what metric you expect to change before a single line of code is written. If you can’t define it, you aren’t ready to build it.
Stop Thinking Like a Factory
A factory is optimized for repeatability and volume. Software development is optimized for discovery and problem-solving. They are opposites. When you treat your developers like factory workers, you get mediocre software. When you treat them like problem solvers, you get innovation.
💡 You might also like: 11 CAD to USD: Why Small Transfers Cost More Than You Think
The shift is uncomfortable. It requires admitting you don't have all the answers. It requires saying "I don't know yet" to people who pay your salary. But the alternative is worse. The alternative is spending your life building things that nobody uses.
Next Steps for Your Team
Start by redefining your "Done" criteria. "Done" shouldn't mean the code is in production. "Done" should mean the code is in production and we have verified it is being used the way we intended.
Move away from the obsession with velocity. Velocity is a measure of speed, not direction. A car going 100 mph in the wrong direction is in much worse shape than a car going 20 mph toward its destination. Focus on "Discovery" as much as "Delivery." Half of your time should be spent figuring out what to build, and the other half building it.
Finally, foster a culture where it’s okay to kill features. If a feature isn't performing, delete it. Pruning a product is just as important as growing it. A bloated product is a confusing product, and a confusing product is a dead product.
Start your next sprint by asking the team: "What is the smallest thing we can do this week to prove our biggest assumption wrong?" That's the first step out of the trap.
Once you stop measuring success by the volume of your output, the real work begins. You'll find that you actually ship less, but what you do ship matters infinitely more. That is the secret to a sustainable, profitable, and actually useful product.