Lean Product Management

A Traditional slow development cycle

The traditional development cycle consists of four stages:

• Define
• Design
• Develop
• Deploy

It can be month-long cycles and customer feedback may only be available only after deployment. This means that if the define and/or design phases weren't precisely aligned to the customer's requirements (and often the customer doesn't fully understand their ultimate requirements at this stage anyway!), a lot of subsequent work can go to waste.

Welcome to the lean startup

The lean product management is around a shorter and faster cycle:

• Learn
• Build
• Measure

The goal is to iterate quickly and instead of basing development decisions on assumptions, you learn and validate repeatedly through the process.

Teams will be built including designers, product managers, engineers around a common goal which can be:

• Increase customer engagement
• Increase the subscription numbers
• Increase the time spent on the product

A lean Product manager involves the whol team and experiments instead of building preconceived solutions. It leads to prevent the creation of defined product roadmaps for the next 2 years.

Lean product management consists of:

• Discovering customer problems through constant customer interaction and feedback
• Delivering high customer value by running experiments to solve those problems
• Leading the implementation of full product solutions for successful experiments, incorporating them into the product strategy
• Involving developers & stakeholders during ideation of the product
• Manage the problem roadmap focusing on KPIs
• Report data and lessons learnt from experiments to the rest of the company