How Untrapping Product Teams Will Help You Drive Value
Teams spend too much time dealing with distractions instead of driving value. It's time to change that.
- Have you ever felt trapped by feature roadmaps?
- Do opinions without evidence drive product decisions?
- Does success mean pleasing stakeholders for the sake of it?
If you answered yes to any of the above, this book will help you improve your situation.
Untrapping Product Teams guides you to simplify what gets unintentionally complicated and equips you to overcome dangerous traps while steadily driving customer and business value. This isn’t just another book about product management. It’s a thought-provoking guide filled with simplicity, encouraging you to act today for a better tomorrow.
This book is for anyone facing the challenges of working on or with product teams. It lays out leading best practices, combined with “secret ingredients” crafted by the author based on years of experience. Learn what makes or breaks product teams so you are ready to do what it takes to thrive with digital products.
Who Will Benefit from This Book
This book is for anyone working with product teams. By product teams, I mean a team of cross-functional professionals working on a digital product. Product teams come with many different labels attached to them. Essentially, they’re other words for the same thing: teams empowered to deliver value.
You will relate to the content in this book and identify applicable insights if you’re part of the product team, lead such a team, or work directly with one. Product managers will benefit the most from this book, as I share many stories from this perspective. Overall, you will learn what makes or breaks product management, and I will take you on a journey from strategy to delivery.
What You Will Get from This Book
- Learn the differences between coordinative and collaborative workflows
- Recognize dangerous traps and the strategies to overcome them
- Explore the product journey: simplify decision-making, apply mindful product discovery, use delivery to accelerate value, and measure results beyond outputs
- Craft product principles and set solid foundations for product teams
- Benefit from proven product health checks to uncover where to act
today for a better tomorrow
Book Structure: Three Parts to Rock the World
Part I: Facing Dangerous Traps. This part helps you analyze your situation and understand which action to take. We will detail the differences between coordinative and collaborative flow. You will learn to evaluate the big picture, mindset, and what complicates value creation. Then, I will help you recognize the dangerous traps and their impacts while gradually preparing you to overcome them. By the end of this part, you will have plenty of insights to boost value creation and simplify unnecessary complexities.
Part II: Overcoming Dangerous Traps. The chapters in Part II focus on equipping you to break free from the traps exposed in Part I. You’ll learn the fundamentals of product management combined with simple techniques. Then, we’ll embark on the product journey. We’ll clarify how to create a strategy simplifying decision-making, apply mindful product discovery, use delivery to accelerate value, and measure results beyond outputs. Part II concludes by exploring traps associated with people and collaboration, first by understanding what makes or breaks product teams and then by clarifying how to build stakeholder relationships.
Part III: Remaining Untrapped. Falling back on common patterns is a natural instinct, but you cannot sit back and relax unless you want to get trapped. Part III clarifies how you can craft product principles and use them to set the foundations to keep your teams untrapped. Then, I will equip you with qualitative health checks to help you step back and recognize the status quo, empowering you to improve your situation.
What People Say About Untrapping Product Teams
Ash Maurya, Founder & CEO, LEANSTACK, Bestselling author and founder
We are living in a new era of product management, and David is one of the leading voices showing us the way. I hope you’ll implement his practical guidance and help pave the way to a world with better products for all.
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Jim Highsmith, Co-author Agile Manifesto, Agile Pioneer, Writer, Storyteller
David rails against what he refers to as “bullshit management,” which arises from complex rules and regulations that are often the product of a “fixed mindset.” If you want a prescription to follow, find another product management book. But if you want clarity of purpose and excellent practices that you can evolve supported by reality-based feedback, stick with David.
Marty Cagan, Partner, Silicon Valley Product Group
David’s book shares several hard-earned lessons of what happens when product leaders, product managers, and especially product owners are not trained to succeed in their jobs, and they go on to make predictable and avoidable mistakes. This book can help you avoid some of these pitfalls.
Petra Wille, Author of Strong Product People
This book touches on all the daily essentials for a product person. It’s a practical guide and a meta-analysis rolled into one, serving as the “Greatest Hits” album of product management. Ideal for newcomers and an excellent refresher for those already immersed in the field.
Mike Cohn, Co-founder, Agile Alliance
This is my new favorite book on product management. Untrapping Product Teams covers everything you need to know to lead a product team and be successful as a product manager. Author David Pereira does an excellent job of pointing out biases and thinking traps that doom products. The book is full of many insights and tools that will be useful for years to come.
Ioana Ognibeni, Product Lead and Coach
David’s book is an antidote to bullshit management, and at the same time, it’s so much more than that. It’s a wake-up call for product teams to regain clarity and focus. It’s a survival kit for every PM in the trenches facing a reality that other product books fail to acknowledge. There is no fluff, no ideal-world scenarios, only experience-based learnings and a generous amount of eye-opening honesty.
Maarten Dalmijn, author of Driving Value with Sprint Goals
David’s brilliant book will help you decipher the chaos of product management and show how to escape all the traps that may condemn your product teams to mediocrity.
Shyvee Shi, Author of Reimagined: Building Products with Generative AI
For those seeking no BS product management, David has got you covered! This book is full of practical and easy-to-follow advice to help you stop building a feature factory. David provides you simple frameworks and templates to use immediately.
Simonetta Batteiger, CEO, Inclusive Leaders
David wrote the book I wish I had read 20 years ago. Instead, I faced these common product team traps without a map of how to practically navigate them. This book is full of wisdom and inspiration for new and experienced product professionals alike. It will save you a lot of time and energy!
Aakash Gupta, author of Product Growth
Untrapping Product Teams is the best way to transition your teams from delivery to empowered. Help your product teams break free of constraints and change the trajectory of your business with David’s book. He speaks not just theory, but from experience.
Phil Hornby, Product Coach, for product people
I worry that many aspiring product managers will read part 1 of this book and run away screaming. David lays bare the challenges that many will encounter in this role. The brave ones who venture to part 2 will find practical advice and tools that will enable them to overcome those challenges and set them up for real success. If they press on to part 3, they will know how to stay that way. Plenty of experienced product people could also learn a thing or two to help them untrap themselves and their teams!
Gil Broza, Value Delivery and Agile Leadership Expert, author of Deliver Better Results
Real-world product management is messy and full of traps that prevent great outcomes. Use David’s experience and nonprescriptive guidance to make good choices and help your company succeed.
Untrapping Product Teams Table of Content
Foreword by Ash Maurya
Foreword by Jim Highsmith
Preface
About the Author
Introduction
Part I: Facing Dangerous Traps
Chapter 1: How Common Ways of Working Trap or Untrap Teams
Chapter 2: The Mindset Impacts on Dangerous Traps
Chapter 3: What Distracts Teams from Creating Value
Part II: Overcoming Dangerous Traps
Chapter 4: Using the Right Ingredients for Product Teams
Chapter 5: Crafting a Meaningful Product Strategy
Chapter 6: Forget What You Know to Get Ready for the Unknown
Chapter 7: Embarking on a Journey to Discover What Matters
Chapter 8: Enabling Product Delivery Beyond Outputs
Chapter 9: Defining and Measuring Actionable Metrics
Chapter 10: Setting the Teams Right
Chapter 11: Building Solid Relationships
Part III: Remaining Untrapped
Chapter 12: Establishing Product Principles
Chapter 13: Assessing Your Company Dynamics
Chapter 14: Evaluating How Your Product Strategy Simplifies Decision-Making
Chapter 15: Understanding How Quickly You Can Drop Bad Ideas
Chapter 16: Examining How Fast You Can Drive Business and Customer Value
Wrap Up
Appendix: Untrapping Lessons
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
David Pereira is a product leader with more than 15 years of experience. He has sharpened his skills by leading diverse teams, from startups to giant corporations. Since 2020, he has openly shared his mistakes, failures, and insights on product management, reaching over 10 million readers worldwide. His thought-provoking courses have more than 15K satisfied students across 120+ countries.
