escaping-the-build-trap

escaping-the-build-trap is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills. It costs 270 tokens per session (2,864 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A product-management framework for explaining why teams can keep building features while customer or business results remain unchanged. It focuses on product strategy, accountability, and the operating support needed to manage products around outcomes rather than output.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to diagnose product teams, review product-management responsibilities, improve roadmaps, and build product-operations practices.
Why use it?
It helps identify organisational causes instead of assuming that individuals simply need to work faster or ship more.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to diagnose product teams, review product-management responsibilities, improve roadmaps, and build product-operations practices.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/escaping-the-build-trap
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills --skill escaping-the-build-trap
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for escaping-the-build-trap

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/escaping-the-build-trap/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/escaping-the-build-trap)
Your own site
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agentmods 80×15 button for escaping-the-build-trap

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/escaping-the-build-trap"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/escaping-the-build-trap.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 270 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,864 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00270 $0.02864
Opus 5 $0.00135 $0.01432
Sonnet 5 $0.00054 $0.00573
Haiku 4.5 $0.00027 $0.00286

Measured 11d ago against content hash d178df25a096, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

escaping-the-build-trap scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/escaping-the-build-trap/SKILL.md · 101 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 101 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Escaping the Build Trap

Melissa Perri's diagnostic + operational frame for product organizations — distilled from Escaping the Build Trap (O'Reilly, 2018), Product Operations (with Denise Tilles, 2023), her 2024 "Four Dimensions of a Great Product Management Organization" model, 271+ episodes of the Product Thinking podcast (weekly since 2020), her Substack (active since 2023), the melissaperri.com blog archive (2014–), and her ongoing LinkedIn commentary through 2026.

This skill helps you think in Perri's method, not just recite it. The method is opinionated because Perri is opinionated: the build trap is a systems pathology, not a PM performance problem. Applying her frame means resisting the reflex to blame the PM, add a process, or ship more features — and instead diagnosing where in the org the strategy vacuum, the misassigned accountability, or the missing operational scaffolding is producing the symptoms.

When this skill activates

Use this skill when the user is:

  • Diagnosing why their product team ships features but customer/business metrics stay flat.
  • Auditing the PM function — role clarity, career ladders, hiring, seniority mix.
  • Rebuilding the roadmap because it has become a Gantt chart / sales contract / feature promise machine.
  • Deploying strategy from Vision down to team-level work and losing coherence along the way.
  • Considering whether/how to stand up a Product Operations function.
  • Trying to make OKRs actually produce outcomes instead of output disguised as outcomes.
  • Debating the "PM as mini-CEO" model or the "one throat to choke" accountability trap.
  • Redesigning teams around value streams instead of components/features.
  • Reading Cagan on the Product Operating Model and wondering where Perri fits.
  • Evaluating whether their org is actually product-led or just uses the vocabulary.

Do NOT use this skill when:

  • The org is pre-product/market-fit — Perri's frame assumes you have a product and a team large enough to have the pathology. Pre-PMF startups need discovery + search frames (Torres, Moesta/JTBD, Lean Startup).
  • The question is pure engineering ("how do we ship faster?", "what's our CI/CD stack?"). Suggest Shape Up, DORA, or SRE frames.
  • The question is about the top-level org transformation (Product Operating Model change). Perri explicitly cedes that altitude to Marty Cagan (Transformed, 2024) and works one level down. Point the user to Cagan and use this skill for the operational scaffolding underneath.
  • The user just wants a summary of Escaping the Build Trap. Give the book link and don't run the diagnostic.

Read the full file on GitHub · 101 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 101 lines · 270 tokens per session scan A d178df25a096

Subscribe to this mod's changes

escaping-the-build-trap is a skill published in the GitHub repository marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills (1 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 270 tokens to every session and 2,864 once invoked, about $0.0014 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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