"Lean" Product Management

“Lean” Product Management
Can Product Management benefit from Lean Startup practices?

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Thank You to Our Sponsors

About Me: Shardul Mehta
Product management & marketing professional
Early career: software developer
Did my first start-up in 2000
Yes, I was a dot-commer!
Small business, family business, enterprise, B2C, B2B, SaaS, web apps, healthcare, retail services, financial services
MBA, Tepper Business School, Carnegie Mellon
B.S., Computer & Information Sciences
Twitter: @shardulmehta
www.linkedin.com/in/shardulmehta
http://streetsmartproductmanager.com

What is Lean Startup?
Started (and trademarked) by Eric Ries – serial entrepreneur, popular blogger
“Lean isn’t about being cheap [but is about] being less wasteful and still doing things that are big.” – Eric Ries
http://theleanstartup.com
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Eliminate Waste
New Product or Service
Low burn startup
Speed of iterations is key to success
Slideshare presentation “Building a Lean Startup” by Ash Maurya
http://www.slideshare.net/ashmaurya/building-a-lean-startup

A synthesis of:
“Customer Development”, a term coined by Steve Blank used to describe the parallel process of building a continuous customer feedback loop throughout the product development process as defined in his book The Four Steps to Epiphany
Agile software development
Application of Toyota’s lean production practices, which focuses on speed and waste reduction via a rigorous and disciplined process
Running Lean is a term coined by Ash Maurya that defines a workflow for building web based software based on his own experiences of rigorously applying and testing Lean Startup practices

Principles of Lean Startup
Validated Learning
Lean Startup is about a methodology of learning
A culture of discovery and validated learning is needed to truly have new product development
Learning can be validated scientifically by running experiments that allow us to test each element of our vision
Innovation accounting
To improve outcomes and hold entrepreneurs accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, how to prioritize work
Build-Measure-Learn
The fundamental activity of a startups is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop
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From http://lean.st/dharmesh

Capture business model hypothesis
Systematically test our plan
Formulate testable, falsifiable hypotheses
Not measurable (“leap of faith”):
Being known as an “expert” will drive early adopters
Specific and testable:
Blog post will drive 100 sign-ups
Validate qualitatively, verify quantitatively
Pick bold outcomes to generate strong negative/positive signals to stop, refine or seek permission to move forward
Create accessible dashboards to measure progress
Communicate learnings early and often
Iterate our way to Product/Market fit
Have we built something people want?
“Steps”
Expected outcome too vague
Specific expected outcome based on repeatable action

Build a Lean Canvas
Created by Ash Maurya as an adaptation of Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas, described in his book Business Model Generation
Capture the Business Model Hypothesis
Benefits:
Fast, compared to writing a b-plan
Multiple canvases can be outlined in a single afternoon
Concise: distill your idea down to its essence
Portable: easier to carry, share, explain and update
From “Lean Startup is a Rigorous Process, Ash Maurya’s blog, http://www.ashmaurya.com/2010/09/lean-startup-is-a-rigorous-process/

Systematically Test Your Plan
Ideal time to seek funding
Do we have a problem worth solving?
Have we built something people want?
How do we accelerate growth?
Are we ready to learn from customers?
Focus: Validated Learning
Experiments: Pivots (i.e., finding a plan that works)
Focus: Growth
Experiments: Optimizations
Focus
3 key questions:
Is it something customers want? (Must-have)
Can it be solved? (Feasible)
Will they pay for it? If not, who will? (Viable)
Focus
Lay groundwork to build MVP and maximize future iterations for speed, learning and focus
Build MVP for early adopters
Launch!
Focus
Identify the right metrics to measure Product/Market Fit
Prioritize and act on learnings
Systematically iterate toward achieving Product/Market Fit
Focus
How does the “mass market” find our solution?
Are they telling others?
Continuous validation via carefully scripted customer interviews

Iterate Our Way to Product/Market Fit
Goals:
Is there a problem worth solving?
How do customers solve this problem today?
Before we build the right solution, we have to understand the problem first
Goal: Define a test possible solution (before implementing it)
Customers are better at articulating problems than visualizing solutions
Goal: Use feedback from the demo to distill the product down to its essence (MVP) to build and test qualitatively with customers
A strong signal grants us permission to move forward, but does not guarantee scalability
Goal: Verify qualitative signals with actionable macro metrics
From Running Lean by Ash Maurya

Focus on the right stuff at the right time, and reduce waste
Validate a problem is worth solving, before defining the solution
Test our vision by measuring how customers behave
Build a continuous feedback loop with customers throughout the product development cycle
Find early (preferably paying) customers
Decide what goes into Release 1.0
Identify ideal time to seek dollars and resources
Test pricing
Maximize for speed, learning and focus
Iterate for Product/Market Fit in small increments
Benefits of Lean Startup

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"Lean" Product Management

by Shardul Mehta

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