Lean Product Management

Reid Hoffman once remarked, “As the networked age has increased the competitive importance of speed, the key secret is now scaling up at speed.” In other words, the internet has enabled consumers to rapidly and easily access and assess new technologies that in turn become exponentially more valuable via network effects. It’s therefore more important Read more »

How do you get everybody in your company to understand your customers — especially if you’re not 100% certain yourself? You ‘got out of the building’ and you’ve talked to your customers, but how do you communicate and build on what you’ve learned when you get back? Traditionally this meant a lot of up front Read more »

Lean UX and Lean product design came about about because it is really hard to work out what customers actually want. This is especially true for digital products, as the field is still really just getting started. At it’s core, Lean is about finding better ways to build products with a higher rate of success. Read more »

Both new and experienced product managers often ask where this role came from and why it seems to have so much crossover with other roles such as Marketing and UX. While there’s no definitive history of product management, it’s often useful to consider our roots and understand how the role evolved over time. If nothing else it helps to understand the organisational trade-offs that happen as our capabilities and thinking evolve. Read more »

Let’s be honest, most products fail. Even in the best companies this happens – for every Google AdWords there’s a Google Wave. In this insightful talk at Mind the Product San Francisco, the inimitable Marty Cagan outlines what he sees as the root causes of these failures. Most teams today start with an idea, even Read more »

Let me get this out of the way: I love Kanban. And this isn’t for any of the usual reasons, such as because it’s a visual management tool, or because it enhances work in progress control, or even because it’s self-managed. I love Kanban because it allows me to not have project management in my product team. Read more »

Tom Chi has practiced rapid prototyping for over 15 years, on everything from software to hardware, organisational design to entrepreneurship. And a lot of the lessons he has learned in rapid prototyping are directly applicable to the discipline of product management. In this exceptional talk from Mind the Product San Francisco in June 2015, he Read more »

After the success of our previous workshops we are running a new set on Thursday, September 10th at a dedicated venue on Hatton Garden, followed by the Mind the Product 2015 conference on Friday. Based on your feedback we’re going much more advanced and in-depth on three of the workshops and continuing to offer our Read more »

This is the second part in the series of blog posts documenting our path to launching a SaaS product. The first part of this series is available here: Part 1 – Launching a B2B SaaS product Now that we’re getting closer to our launch date, we’re busy preparing. For us, that means coding, design work, documentation, and generally Read more »

What “lean” means for us in product development I very firmly include myself in the group of people converted to the “lean” product philosophy, but what does this word really mean? Well for the broader context, lean derives from post-war Japanese culture, where limited resources were the standard. Working in these conditions – a situation Read more »