Lean Product Management

How do you know whether a product idea is going to succeed if you build it and take it to market?  If you’ve ever been part of a startup, or if your organization has launched a new products, you know how precarious the effort can be. Sure, there is Lean methodology for discovering product-market fit, Read more »

I built the same product three times. It wasn’t an act of insanity. It was my way to get my product ready in three weeks. Before I get to that, let me backtrack a little. It was the 1st of March 2013 and I’d just left my job as CIO at one of the UK’s Read more »

Challenging your assumptions can pay off. This is what UK retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S) discovered when they created a digital lab and started applying Lean Startup techniques to their products. At ProductTank February, Hemal Kuntawala (@hemalkuntawala) talked us through some of the specific insights and assumptions they wanted to challenge.  Each assumption is met with a Read more »

As the UK shops itself out of recession, it was more than fitting that February’s ProductTank London was all about product management in commerce: online, offline and mobile.  This month we had three eye-opening talks: CEO at Depop Runar Reistrup (@runarreistrup) talking about mobile design for the real world; “the Malcolm Tucker of testing” Craig Read more »

As product managers and entrepreneurs, we know the importance of validating an idea before committing to getting it built. However, validation is easier said than done. In fact, it’s possibly one of the hardest things you will ever do in your product life cycle, otherwise products and startups wouldn’t have the abysmal 90%+ failure rate Read more »

How do you know whether a product idea is going to succeed if you build it and take it to market?  If you’ve ever been part of a startup, or if your organization has launched a new line of products, you know how precarious the effort can be. Some would advocate using the ‘Lean’ method Read more »

Agile methodologies extol the virtues of releasing early and using feedback to guide your product decisions. For new products, this philosophy works well and can avoid wasting effort building features that users don’t value. However, agile techniques often hit problems when used on established products due to stakeholder fears about brand and experience damage. The Read more »

In How to make products that people love, Marty Cagan had tons of good advice for rapid product discovery, including the importance of finding the fastest, cheapest way to validate ideas. Chief among this toolkit is the rough live data prototype. For teams working primarily with digital products, this type of rapid prototyping in software Read more »

The public discourse around startups, product management and UX has become a touch dogmatic for my taste lately. If you’re not following the Lean Startup(TM) to the letter, holding daily scrums, doing continuous integration, embracing failure or (pick your own buzzword) you’re apparently doing something wrong. But I think this sort of dogmatic thinking is Read more »