Managing Product Development Using Lean Framework

There is a lot of buzz (rightly so) around using a lean start-up framework to enable agile product development with a goal to build products that customers want. As organizations use this framework, it’s equally important to recognize that this framework provides a great set of tools to manage product development process but these tools are not a replacement for a well thought out product strategy, which I believe is a prerequisite to using Lean Start-up framework. Great tools without a solid product strategy do no good. 

Product Development framework, based on my own experience, must include the following 3-key steps:

1. Build product hypotheses – This is where various product strategies and assumptions would be developed.  The hypotheses should be driven by customer outcomes you want to deliver while driving the costs down and simultaneously increasing value for the buyers.
2. Implement lean product development model – This is about leveraging the Lean Startup Framework to test and refine the product hypotheses, and to make pivot vs persevere decisions.
3. Build organizational culture – This is critical for the success of the product development plans. Creating awareness around lean framework, agile product development and educating the organization about managing this process is super critical.  Often times, company executives like the idea of lean start-up, but fail to understand the nuances essential to successfully navigating the teams, and therefore the company, to success thru this process. Expectation mismatch is quite common when many executives expect a ‘final and finished’ product for the launch particularly when product teams are still testing the hypotheses.

More on each of these themes in future blogs!