Cover image for Lean Product Management

Lean Product Management

Author Mangalam Nandakumar
Release Date: 2018/05/01
ISBN: 9781788831178
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Book Description

A guide to product management exploring the best practices: identifying the impact-driven product, planning for success, setting up and measuring time-bound metrics, and developing a lean product roadmap.

About This Book
  • Identifying Impact-Driven Products
  • Investing in Key Business Outcomes
  • Value mapping to maintain a lean product backlog
  • Utilizing time-bound product metrics
  • Eliminating process waste
Who This Book Is For

If you are leading a team that is building a new product, then this book is for you. The book is targeted at product managers, functional leads in enterprises, business sponsors venturing into new product offerings, product development teams, and start-up founders.

What You Will Learn
  • How do you execute ideas that matter?
  • How can you define the right success metrics?
  • How can you plan for product success?
  • How do you capture qualitative and quantitative insights about the product?
  • How do you know whether your product aligns to desired business goals?
  • What processes are slowing you down?
In Detail

Lean Product Management is about finding the smartest way to build an Impact Driven Product that can deliver value to customers and meet business outcomes when operating under internal and external constraints. Author, Mangalam Nandakumar, is a product management expert, with over 17 years of experience in the field.

Businesses today are competing to innovate. Cost is no longer the constraint, execution is. It is essential for any business to harness whatever competitive advantage they can, and it is absolutely vital to deliver the best customer experience possible. The opportunities for creating impact are there, but product managers have to improvise on their strategy every day in order to capitalize on them. This is the Agile battleground, where you need to stay Lean and be able to respond to abstract feedback from an ever shifting market. This is where Lean Product Management will help you thrive.

Lean Product Management is an essential guide for product managers, and to anyone embarking on a new product development. Mangalam Nandakumar will help you to align your product strategy with business outcomes and customer impact. She introduces the concept of investing in Key Business Outcomes as part of the product strategy in order to provide an objective metric about which product idea and strategy to pursue. You will learn how to create impactful end-to-end product experiences by engaging stakeholders and reacting to external feedback.

Style and approach

The first few chapters of Lean Product Management address how to arrive at a product road map. It guides you through the process of getting stakeholder buy-in, prioritizing Key Business Outcomes and identifying the Impact-Driven Product, and arriving at a Cost-Impact matrix through value mapping. The next few chapters address how to define time-bound success metrics. It guides you through the process of creating an end-to-end product experience, capturing qualitative and quantitative insights to track product performance and alignment to short and long term product strategy. The last set of chapters of the book address process bottlenecks that hold teams back from building products right and how to eliminate process waste.

Table of Contents

  1. Lean Product Management
    1. Table of Contents
    2. Lean Product Management
    3. Why subscribe?
      1. Why subscribe?
      2. PacktPub.com
    4. Contributors
      1. About the author
      2. About the reviewer
      3. Packt is Searching for Authors Like You
    5. Preface
      1. Who this book is for
      2. What this book covers
        1. Part 1 – Defining what to build, who we are building for, and why
        2. Part 2 - Are we building the right product?
        3. Part 3 - Are we building the product right?
      3. To get the most out of this book
        1. Download the color images
      4. Get in touch
        1. Reviews
    6. I. Defining what to build, who we are building for, and why
      1. 1. Identify Key Business Outcomes
        1. We are driven by purpose
        2. Business context defines everything we do
        3. What influences product success?
        4. A business model
          1. Case study
            1. Defining business outcomes that the product can deliver (why?)
            2. Defining the value proposition that the product will create for the customer (what?)
            3. Defining the execution plan (how?)
            4. Business constraints and market influence
            5. Minimum Viable Product versus Impact Driven Product
        5. Key Business Outcomes
        6. Summary
      2. 2. Invest in Key Business Outcomes
        1. Investments
        2. Time-bound priorities for Key Business Outcomes
          1. Trade-offs in time-bound planning
        3. Investing in Key Business Outcomes
          1. So how do we know which trade-offs are worth making?
          2. How do we decide which learning, feedback, or customer insight is important?
        4. Playing the Investment Game–what outcomes will the business bet on in the next one-to-two months?
          1. Buy a Feature game
        5. Summary
      3. 3. Identify the Solution and its Impact on Key Business Outcomes
        1. Finding the right problem to solve
        2. To build or not to build?
        3. Creating an end-to-end view of the user and business (product/service) interaction
        4. Estimating impact on Key Business Outcomes and derive value scores
          1. Deriving value scores
            1. Deriving value scores
        5. Visualizing our priorities using a 2 × 2 matrix
        6. Summary
      4. 4. Plan for Success
        1. What does success mean to us?
        2. Defining success metrics
        3. Mismatch in expectations from technology
        4. Cost of technical trade-offs
        5. Defining technical success criteria
        6. Summary
      5. 5. Identify the Impact Driven Product
        1. Understanding product impact
        2. The cost of creating an impactful product experience
        3. Defining the Impact Driven Product
        4. Value mapping
        5. Deciding to build, buy, or not at all
        6. The cost of a digital solution
        7. Risks of not building something
        8. The cost-impact matrix
        9. Summary
    7. II. Are we building the right product?
      1. 6. Managing the Scope of an Impact Driven Product
        1. Are we there yet?
        2. Faster is not always smarter
        3. Minimum Viable Product (mvp)
          1. Missing pieces in the mvp model
        4. A brief time lapse on car making
        5. So, what is the most impactful product?
          1. Products for an unexplored market versus products for mature markets
          2. How do we know if we have defined the right Impact Driven Product?
          3. Validate market needs based on key business outcomes
          4. Validating if customers will adopt our product
          5. What is the smartest way to deliver impact?
          6. Iterate on scope
        6. Happy customers at every phase of the product
        7. Summary
      2. 7. Track, Measure, and Review Customer Feedback
        1. Why do well-made products fail?
          1. Understanding customer context
        2. Feedback blind spots
        3. Types of customers
        4. Understanding the perceived value of our product
        5. What aspect of our product experience matters most?
          1. Creating product loyalists
          2. Knowing who the real user is
        6. How and when to collect feedback?
          1. External feedback channels
          2. In-built feedback channels
        7. Is the consumer ready to share feedback?
        8. Summary
      3. 8. Tracking Our Progress
        1. The need for gratification
        2. Is our product working well for the customer?
          1. Benchmarking
          2. Metrics that validate or falsify success criteria
            1. Contextual qualitative insights
          3. Is our product working well for the business?
            1. Delayed gratification
        3. Summary
    8. III. Are we building the product right?
      1. 9. Eliminate Waste – Don't Estimate!
        1. Why do we need estimates?
        2. Why can estimates not be accurate?
        3. What should be the outcome of an estimation discussion?
        4. Summary
      2. 10. Eliminate Waste – Don't Build What We Can Buy
        1. Selling an idea
        2. What got you here won't get you there
        3. To build or not to build
        4. Feature black holes that suck up a product team's time
        5. Summary
      3. 11. Eliminate Waste – Data Versus Opinions
        1. Defining the hypothesis
        2. #1 – data we need before we build the feature idea
        3. #2 – data we need after we launch a feature
        4. The problem with data
        5. Summary
      4. 12. Is Our Process Dragging Us Down?
        1. Business and organization context
        2. Reason #1 for process waste – striving for perfection
        3. Reason #2 for process waste – striving for efficiency
        4. Reason #3 for process waste – striving to maximize throughput
        5. Solutions to eliminating process waste
        6. Solution #1 – don't strive for perfection, instead set up outcome-driven timelines
        7. Solution #2 – don't strive for efficiency, instead foster collaboration
        8. Solution #3 – don't strive for throughput, instead restructure teams based on outcome-driven timelines
        9. Summary
      5. 13. Team Empowerment
        1. Tenets of lean software development
        2. Decision making
        3. Collaboration
        4. Summary
    9. Another Book You May Enjoy
      1. Understanding Software
      2. Leave a review - let other readers know what you think
    10. Index
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