Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri at Mind the Product San Francisco 2017

Like most of us, when Melissa Perri started as a product manager she started with giant requirements documents, dutifully recording every little detail from stakeholders and turning them into shiny docs for the developers. Then she discovered Agile and churned out features even faster. But eventually she realised that she had been building features for years and never been quite sure whether users actually liked them or used them.

Melissa calls this the Build Trap, and a lot of product teams are stuck in it. They're defining and shipping software with no measures of success, too busy managing the backlog, and focusing on getting features out the door. Too focused on building any thing rather than the right thing.

In this insightful talk, Melissa shares how to identify that you are in the build trap - and more importantly what we can do as product leaders and product managers to escape it.

For more great talks, and a community of thousands of product people, head to mindtheproduct.com.