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Book summaries
  • Pages
    • Index
      • Radical product thinking
        • Introduction. A Repeatable Model for Building World-Changing Products
        • Part I. Innovating Smarter Requires a New Mindset
          • Chapter 1. Why we Need Radical Product Thinking
          • Chapter 2. Product diseases
        • Part II. The five elements of radical product thinking
          • Chapter 3. Vision
          • Chapter 4. Strategy
          • Chapter 5. Prioritization
          • Chapter 6. Execution and measurement
          • Chapter 7. Culture
        • Part III. Making our world a little more like the one we want to live in
          • Chapter 8. Digital pollution
          • Chapter 9. Ethics
          • Conclusion
      • Escaping the build trap (WIP)
        • Preface
        • Part I. The build trap
          • 1. The Value Exchange System
          • icon picker
            2. Constraints on the value exchange system
          • 3. Projects versus products versus services
          • 4. The product-led organisation
          • 5. What we know and what we don't
      • Strategize (To do)
      • UX strategy (To do)
      • Product roadmaps relaunched (To do)
Book summaries
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2. Constraints on the value exchange system
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2. Constraints on the value exchange system

Customers and users are influenced by the people they hang out with—​their communities, families, and friends. They’re also influenced by other technology—​things available to them and on the market right now. Your customers and users don’t exist in a vacuum, and so their wants and needs change according to what’s around them.
Likewise, your opportunities for how to address those wants and needs are constantly evolving. Directly controlling these surroundings is out of the hands of companies, so the only thing we can do is understand them better to know how to act.
Simultaneously, businesses face their own constraints. To realize the maximum value, organizations need to have the right individuals, the right processes, the right policies, the right strategy, and the right culture. Although many of the constraints and influences on the customer side are out of our control, businesses have full control over their own constraints and how they deal with them. When these constraints squeeze too tight, value is sacrificed on both sides of the system.
For example, many companies follow such a rigid development process and cadence that there is no opportunity to experiment.
Yet many companies are stuck in output mode, and their entire organization is optimized to increase the output. Their processes are driven by deadlines and by checking off as many features on a list as possible. Teams are rewarded and incentivized to build more. Policies exist for the purpose of pushing teams to write more code or ship more features, and efforts (like talking to customers) are seen as waste.
Most companies are unaware of the detrimental impact these factors have on their value production, and it’s because they are not actually measuring the outcomes of their actions. They lose track of their strategy and vision, and they end up in the build trap. To be strategic and to have people operate strategically, we need to stop judging teams based on the quantity of features shipped. We should instead define and measure value and then celebrate them for delivering on outcomes for our business and users.
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