Introduction
Lean product development and management is inspired from the concept of “lean manufacturing,” a production method focused on reducing production times and response times from suppliers to customers. Objectively, lean product development and management focuses on:
- Reusable knowledge
- Parallel development
- Cross-functional teams
- Development cadences
- Visualization
- Entrepreneurial design
- Flow management
Theory
At its highest level, lean product development and management focuses on ensuring product market-fit. Typically, you start with a business model, target customer, and validation of your product’s purpose, audience, and value.
Then, once you’ve identified your product’s landscape and audience, you ideate on what value your audience is looking for. What problems are out there for your audience? What are you in a position to address? You’ll want to dive deep into promising problems to address and spend the time to research your customers and understand them at a deeper level. Essentially, you’re looking to validate whether or not your product has a fit in the market.
Finally, you then create a solid, yet innovative, business strategy to help your solution stand apart from your competitors and then scale your product in the interest of growth and revenue.
In turn, this methodology places primary focus upon your customers, you typically get a quicker return on investment, and you have a notably smaller risk of failing.
Execution
The execution of Lean product development and management is fairly straightforward. We touched upon the general flow of it above in theory — to execute, we simply go through the flow while applying the following principles throughout:
Respect Your Team
Foster seamless, two-way communication, communicate clear deadlines, and provide regular training programs to keep the team sharp and collaborative.
Remove Wasteful Activities
Less is more. Keep an eye out for things like:
- Unnecessary features, functionalities, and steps
- Communication gaps between stakeholders
- Bugs/defects in new product features/functionalities
Test Frequently
Constantly be testing features and functionalities and support an ongoing feedback loop with QA and your end-users. When you write tickets, ensure you include acceptance criteria so it is clear what must be tested for each development. Practice regular regression testing (general rule of thumb is to do spot regression testing every release cycle, and full, end-to-end regression testing every major release cycle). You may also consider adopting pair programming practices to reduce the amount of bugs and defects.
Knowledge Transfer
Document everything. Lean teams spend less time and resources working out how something works and avoid making uninformed decisions. This will likely take the form of:
- Business workflow diagrams
- Code workflow diagrams
- Documented requirements (things like PRDs)
- Documented research (things like “spikes)
- Regular feedback loops with stakeholders
Maximize Your Resources
Lean teams strive for an optimal product lifecycle. You’ll want to encourage consistent code reviews and testing efforts, define measurable objectives, and also foster a collaborative, cross-functional environment with your team(s).
Conclusion
Lean product development and management is all about optimization and minimizing waste. In other words, while other frameworks like Agile and Kanban revolve around a particular way work is done, Lean revolves around the environment work is done in.
However you go about building and maintaining your product, consider incorporating some (or all) of the principles of Lean product development and management to keep your team and the product(s) moving efficiently and effectively.