Breanna Hughes discusses how agile and lean product management approaches can help keep teams focused on building the right features. She emphasizes starting with validating key assumptions through small tests before building minimal viable products. Prioritizing the highest value user flows and shipping imperfect products early allows teams to iterate quickly and improve based on user feedback and analytics. Rinsing and repeating this process helps product managers continuously refine their understanding of users' needs.

1. Breanna Hughes, January 29 2015
breanna@breannahughes.com
Product Management that keeps
you Lean and Launchable

2. Tweet
@unbrelievable
#ProductHuntTO

3. Who am I?
Former Product Manager at Pivotal
Labs
Now Product Manager at Wattpad (as of this week!)

4. What do I know?
• Worked with many clients, from startups to
Enterprise to define, design, build and launch
their mobile products
• Launched a new product roughly every quarter
• Featured in App Stores
• All using Agile Agile Agile

5. What do I want you to know?
How Agile + Lean Product Management
can keep you focused on building the right thing
(without using so many buzzwords )

6. Business Plans!How a lot of people do it

7. Which actually looks like this

8. How I like to do it

9. Many different flavours of agile
(in many ugly images)

10. Agile Manifesto
Individuals and interactions over process and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiations
Responding to change over following a plan

11. Typical Agile Development Process
Small teams (usually of PM, Dev, Design)
Daily Standups
Weekly Iteration Planning Meeting
1 Week Development Cycle (or iteration)
Test Weekly (or daily! Or TDD!)
Weekly Retrospectives
Weekly Demos
Deploy Every 2-4 Weeks

12. Sounds great, right?
So why doesn’t everyone do it?

13. ?????????
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14. What is Agile Product Management?
(hint: this is a trick question)

15. What is Agile Product Management?
Nothing, officially.
“Agile” is a development methodology.
Product Manager (or Owner) is a role within that methodology.

16. PM + Agile + Lean = <3
I’ll take you through how product management
works in an agile + lean environment

17. 1
Wait… what’s lean?
PSSST - READ THAT BOOK!

18. Where you should start?
• Should this product even be built?
• Validate the riskiest, most important assumptions
Important
Risky
Less Important
Less Risky

19. Example Assumption:
Our Customers will buy our products from their phone

20. How can you validate?
“What’s the smallest test I can run to validate my
assumption?”

21. Validation Examples
User Interviews
• Don’t ask leading questions (ie. Would you
prefer to purchase from a website that is
specifically designed for your phone?)
• Ask them in past tense: “have you ever
done x before?”
• Find out what problems they are
experiencing
“Have you ever purchased a product from your phone?”
“Tell me about the experience you had purchasing a
product from your phone”

22. Validation Examples
Analytics
• If you have a pre-existing product, you’re
in luck! Analytics can tell you a lot about
what your users are doing
• Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Flurry,
Omniture
“Are users buying products from your website using their
phone?”

23. Validation Examples
Fake Hooks (AKA Smoke and Mirrors)
• You can put up links and “coming soon”
pages to determine whether or not a
certain feature is desired by users
Place a “tap here for our mobile site” link

24. Validation Examples
Experiments
• AB or Multi-variable tests when you aren’t
completely sure what will work the best
• Optimizely, Taplytics, Google Analytics,
Localytics etc
“Will users convert better with a 2 grid product layout or
3?”

25. Validation Examples
Prototypes
• You can create prototypes without any
code
• Get it on device, watch how users interact
• Invision app is the best best best best
http://www.invisionapp.com
Are they confused? What is the biggest stumbling block?

26. You’ve validated. Now what?

27. Minimal Working Product
MVP MWP
• Minimal Working Product
• Always build working software
• Start with the feature that has the highest
business value
“If we launch today, are these features useful to the end
user?”

28. Best MWP, Ever. EVER.
Push for Pizza: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id868275506?mt=8
@PushForPizza

29. Typical User Flow for an E-Commerce App
1. User signs in
2. User browses for Product
3. User selects size, colour
4. Adds to bag
5. Provides deliver information
6. User Provides Payment info
7. User places order

30. What do you build first?
1. User signs in
2. User browses for Product
3. User selects size, colour
4. Adds to bag
5. Provides deliver information
6. User Provides Payment info
7. User places order
What is the most useful part of this flow?
People always go for this badboy

31. Prioritization
User places an order
Why?
• A user sign up to their hearts content, but if
you can’t purchase them, the app is
effectively pointless
We prioritize placing an order above
customization and browsing
We could hardcode one product to purchase
and ship it

32. Prioritization
The rest of the flow
You can start to layer other customization
elements onto the flow in order of highest
business value.
Next could be “user can specify what store
they want to pick up the t-shirt”
Then
“User can specify what size of t-shirt”
And so on..

33. Benefits
Why do this?
• Keeps you focused on the core, most
valuable features of the app
• Allows you to make a decision of when to
ship throughout the process
• You are always naturally working towards
a MVP
• Makes it easy to trade off low priority
features (you didn’t spend time on screens
no one will use)

34. Many different flavours of agile
(in many ugly images)

35. Ship Imperfect Product
• You will never get everything perfect the
first time
• Or the second time
• Or third
• Or fourth…….
• Agile development allows you the
flexibility to respond to issues
Good product management is knowing when it’s “Good
Enough”

36. Make sure you measure
• Look at analytics to find
“problem” areas of your product
• Track analytics from the very
beginning
• Track what users might be trying
to do
Analytics is a whole other
talk……

37. Rinse and Repeat

38. PM Resources on ProductHunt
• http://www.producthunt.com/byosko/collections/product-
management-tools
• http://www.producthunt.com/posts/product-manager-
handbook
Support other products and other PMs!
Share your learnings, your tips and
tricks.

39. Thank you!
@unbrelievable
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/breannahughes
breanna@breannahughes.com
If you want to learn more (or enable your
company) on Agile Development, Pivotal Labs is
where it’s at!
http://www.pivotallabs.com