Lean Product Management

I wonder what it is about feature roadmaps that is comforting to the C-suite. Is it the false sense of security that you’re setting yourself up to deliver a list of features based on untested assumptions and educated guesses? Is it the delusion that locking your organisation into a plan a year in advance equals Read more »

Every product comes with a tumultuous ‘origin story’. Ours is still unfolding, but I’ve been reflecting on what building a product business within a service agency has brought to the tale. We decided, about 18 months ago, that our consultancy business model, though growing and successful, could benefit from diversification — specifically, from creating something with tangible intellectual property. Six Read more »

Like the technology we use to build the products we love ages and gets left behind, Agile has died while we were perfecting our standup. In this post, I’ll explain why.  Read more »

For me, as it also is for many product people, the idea of applying a scientific approach to product management came from Eric Ries in Lean Startup – put simply, his approach outlines the way companies can successfully build and launch new products by learning what their customers really want and by testing continuously. In Read more »

“Product/Market Fit” is a concept that every start-up founder knows is important, but many have trouble achieving or even defining. In The Lean Product Playbook, author Dan Olsen details a six-step process to achieving product/market fit: Determine your target customer Identify underserved customer needs Define your value proposition Specify your MVP feature set Create your Read more »

Coach, lean advocate, and author Jeff Gothelf talked about scaling Lean principles at this year’s London #mtpcon. Lean methodologies work well for a single team observes Gothelf: “A lean startup reduces risk by regular and continuous experimentation. When you take the concept of lean and combine it with agile you start to build a practice Read more »

I spoke to Lean Startup coach Tristan Kromer at Lean Startup Week earlier this month, where he presented a workshop about a “lean experiments toolbox”. Lean Startup Week is a conference for teams and leaders interested in applying a Lean Startup methodology to their product and Tristan helped to organise the Lean Unconference that kicked off Read more »

By now, you’ve almost certainly heard about Continuous Delivery, and some of the benefits it brings to development and product teams. Claire Mitchell (Senior Product Manager at the BBC) talks about how her team at the BBC embraced Continuous Delivery and, as a result, felt huge benefits to their ability to build product and integrate as a team. Read more »

Michele Ide-Smith is a UX designer with over 17 years’ experience designing digital products and services. She loves solving complex problems: from re-designing government and educational services, to creating productivity tools for software teams, and she is currently a UX designer and researcher at The European Bioinformatics Institute. In this in-depth case study, Michele will share Read more »

Paul Lomax has been with Dennis Publishing for 5 years, and experienced first-hand the problem of bringing a focus on technology into a business in an industry that has not historically been at all technology-focused. So how do you do technology if you’re not a technology company? Part of the challenge is that you’re unlikely Read more »