At they’re core, lean practices and methods are about creating products that tap into real user needs. Lean helps product managers—and the teams they work with—maintain a consistent and valuable stream of communication with users, which in turn creates sustainable products with a long lifespan. Working on things that directly create value for users is at the heart of lean development. To start defining value from the user space, lean product teams begin by actively establishing tactics to better understand their users. LPPD is a powerful system for developing new products and services, as well as the processes needed to produce and deliver them.
Business process mapping is a visual, step-by-step guide to the business process from beginning to end. In product management, process maps can be used to showcase the process of bringing a product from ideation to implementation and, finally, release. On top of the usual product development metrics, the leadership in charge of making the lean transition should have metrics specific to track the results of the lean transformation.
Scaled Agile, Inc
Empowering product teams requires that the product manager works on a few things. At the highest level, the goal of adopting lean thinking is to quickly deliver value to customers in shorter cycle times without sacrificing quality or the well-being of a team. It’s about optimizing the way value flows through a delivery cycle in a sustainable way that doesn’t delay delivery or jeopardize team morale. Lean product development empowers teams with knowledge and efficient processes, so they can mitigate product launch delays and drive more customer satisfaction and profitability. Teams that are resource-strained can use this approach to compete with larger companies with bigger budgets. It works by having the product development team getting feedback on features by putting the product in the hands of its customers.
- The decision to adopt lean comes with a lot of bureaucratic and cultural barriers.
- Toyota’s continued success has led to the rise of lean thinking across industries, from manufacturing, to retail, to healthcare, construction, etc.
- Pair programming, sometimes known as “two heads better than one,” is a concept in software engineering.
- Set strategy, collect ideas, manage releases, prioritize features, create roadmaps, and report on progress in a centralized system.
- Business process mapping is a visual, step-by-step guide to the business process from beginning to end.
- The product manager must oversee the creation of a roadmap that highlights customer problems and outlines the priority of solutions to align with key stakeholders in the product development process.
As Toyota learned, it’s far cheaper to vet an array of different ideas early in the development process than to learn that customers don’t like the product until after it’s already been built. Lean organizations strive to capture organizational knowledge and make it available to others to avoid wasteful duplication of effort. Knowledge isn’t always easy to capture or share, and an entire field of theories and systems exist to make it more practical.
Deliver Fast
His daily duties include managing clients’ projects, consulting on technical issues, and managing a team of highly qualified developers. It might seem self-evident; every team wants to build quality into their work. But unless this is part of a disciplined practice, it’s far easier said than done. In trying to ensure quality, many teams actually create waste – through excessive testing, for example, or an excessive logging of defects. The Lean-Agile mindset forms the cornerstone of a new way of working and an enhanced company culture that enables Business Agility. It provides leaders and change agents with the tools needed to drive a successful SAFe transformation, helping individuals and enterprises achieve their goals.
It sounds great in theory, but how do you know when it’s valuable to use lean product development instead of other methodologies? It all starts with a solid understanding of the key principles of lean product development, so you can adopt this approach for your team. Lean software development is a methodology in software engineering that originates from Lean manufacturing. After studying the success of Lean development in the production factories of Toyota, modern-day experts started thinking about how to adapt its concept to knowledge work (ex. software, marketing, etc.). Fast forward to 2003, the term Lean software development first appeared in a book by the same name, written by Mary and Tom Poppendieck.
Lean product development
Software development is a continuous learning process based on iterations when writing code. Software design is a problem-solving process involving the developers writing the code and what they have learned. Software value is measured in fitness for use and not in conformance to requirements.
Find partners who are able to help realize your product, streamline your design and development process and ask customers for feedback along the way. LogRocket identifies friction points in the user experience so you can make informed decisions about product and design changes that must happen to hit your goals. With LogRocket, you can understand the scope of the issues affecting your product and prioritize the changes that need to be made. LogRocket simplifies workflows by allowing Engineering, Product, UX, and Design teams to work from the same data as you, eliminating any confusion about what needs to be done. Other practices such as code commenting and regular training for developers also lend themselves to lean product development.
The complete product management solution
Lean manufacturing aims to reduce waste and eliminate unnecessary processes to optimize production and minimize cost. The decisions made during this process can immediately show results during the manufacturing process. For example, if defective products are making it out of production, a manufacturer might add lean product development software a quality check to minimize defects. Implementing lean development at an organization isn’t as easy as explaining the benefits to the team and sending them a list of to-do’s. Before starting out, the leadership team should establish an actionable vision and goals that the entire organization understands.
Lean thinking is where Lean development, Lean management, Lean UX, and Lean startup were formed. After each short iteration, project managers hold regular meetings (one of the Lean development practices) to identify and eliminate waste. They enable team members to report their progress, highlight bottlenecks, and suggest changes for the next iterations, allowing them to learn and enabling code modifications to be implemented in small, manageable steps.
Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools
But one of the most positive lean changes a product manager can encourage is giving teams the freedom to make decisions based on their expertise. Autonomy is motivating and it can be created by doing something as simple as decentralizing the product team and making departmental knowledge and tools widely available. In these retros, your team can easily chat through past tasks and work experiences to identify where changes are needed. Just remember that you need to be honest and forthright; optimizing the product development process is only possible when everyone trusts their peers to work together towards the same goal.
The Lean manufacturing concept emerged in the mid-20th century out of a production process Toyota developed as part of its Toyota Way philosophy. Lean manufacturing aimed to reduce product defects, cut out waste, increase productivity, and encourage accountability and innovation. The Toyota Production System was developed to meet the needs and changing tastes of a growing middle class following World War II.
What are the benefits of Lean software development?
It comes from our own experience of the issues we find repeatedly in the market. I can’t say it is an approach that every development group can provide successfully. It depends on making clear choices that will provide these outcomes and not waffling with half measures.