The Build Trap: How to Build Products That Create Value

The Build Trap: How to Build Products That Create Value

Author: Melissa Perri
Published: 2018
Core Focus: Product thinking, avoiding feature factories, and building value-driven technical organizations

Key Concept: The Build Trap

The Build Trap occurs when organizations become obsessed with shipping features and meeting deadlines rather than creating actual value for users and the business. For Staff Engineers, recognizing and escaping this trap is critical to technical leadership.

Quick Facts

• Feature Factory vs Product Company: Organizations in the Build Trap measure success by features shipped, not outcomes achieved
• Value Exchange: Good products create a clear exchange of value between the business and the customer
• Product-Led Organizations: These companies structure around outcomes, not outputs
• Role of Technical Leaders: Staff Engineers must advocate for value over velocity

Core Ideas for Technical Leaders

The Product Death Cycle

1. Senior leadership demands more features
2. Engineering becomes order-takers
3. Teams ship without validation
4. Features don’t create value
5. Leadership demands more features faster

Breaking the cycle: Staff Engineers must champion outcome-based metrics and technical discovery alongside product discovery.

Product Kata Framework

• Direction: Where are we going?
• Current State: Where are we now?
• Next Target Condition: What’s our next milestone?
• What’s blocking us? Active experimentation to learn

This mirrors how Staff Engineers should approach technical strategy.

Value vs Activity

Activity Metrics (Bad):

• Lines of code written
• Features shipped
• Velocity points completed
• Tickets closed

Value Metrics (Good):

• Customer retention improved
• Revenue increased
• Support costs reduced
• System reliability enhanced

Product Operations Model

Staff Engineers operate at different levels:

• Operational: Day-to-day execution (Junior/Mid)
• Tactical: Short-term plans, quarterly goals (Senior)
• Strategic: Long-term vision, 1-3 years (Staff+)

Key Takeaways for Staff Engineers

1. Product Thinking is Technical Leadership

• Understand the “why” behind features before diving into “how”
• Push back on solutions until problems are validated
• Frame technical decisions in terms of business outcomes

2. Strategy Deployment

• Strategy is a framework for making decisions
• Good strategy doesn’t prescribe solutions, it guides discovery
• Communicate strategy through examples, not documents

3. Experiment-Driven Technical Decisions

• Treat architecture decisions like product experiments
• Define hypotheses and success metrics
• Be willing to kill technical initiatives that don’t create value

4. Communication Anti-Patterns

• Jargon-heavy technical specs that exclude stakeholders
• Solutions disguised as problems
• Defensiveness when questioned about value

5. Signs You’re in the Build Trap

• No one can articulate the problem being solved
• Success defined by shipping on time, not outcomes
• Technical roadmaps full of “nice to have” improvements
• Architecture decisions made without business context

Practical Application

For Technical Strategy

1. Start with user/business problems: “We lose customers during checkout” not “We need GraphQL”
2. Define success metrics: What changes if this technical initiative succeeds?
3. Time-box exploration: Give yourself 2 weeks to validate technical approaches
4. Kill bad ideas fast: Failed experiments are learning, not failure

For Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Learn product management frameworks (Jobs to be Done, Product Strategy Pyramid)
• Attend user research sessions
• Participate in outcome definition, not just solution delivery
• Speak the language of value, not just technology

For Career Growth

• Staff+ engineers are force multipliers through good judgment
• Good judgment comes from understanding context: business, users, constraints
• Context comes from engaging with the full product lifecycle
• Technical excellence is necessary but not sufficient

Money Quote

“The company that wins is the one that learns faster than the competition.”

For Staff Engineers: Your role is to accelerate organizational learning through technical excellence, not just to ship code faster.

Bottom Line

Technical leaders must escape the Build Trap by connecting their work to measurable outcomes. Staff Engineers who understand product thinking become strategic partners, not just implementers. The most impactful technical decisions stem from deep understanding of user and business value, not just technical elegance.