GE 12: Streamlining success - Applying lean techniques to product management

The lean method of production is a philosophy developed by the Toyota Production System. It focuses on eliminating inefficiency while delivering the highest level of value to the customer.

What happens when we apply LEAN techniques, particularly the concept of elimination of waste to product management? Despite the origins of LEAN coming from traditional physical manufacturing, there are plenty of concepts that can be transferred to the software development process. This article focuses on aspects that are particularly relevant for product managers.

Overproduction

Overproduction relates to producing more goods or services than are required by the customer or more that can be sold in a timely manner. In product management, this may translate into developing features that are not required or will never be used by your customers. At its worst, it could even mean developing entire products that are never used. Overproduction can be caused by a lack of user and market research. Talk to your customers to make sure that planned features will be useful and users are ready to use them (and willing to pay for them). Even if the feature is considered useful, users may not be in a position to use them due to other pre-requisites not being in place.

Inventory

In manufacturing, we picture wasted inventory as piles of unsold stock stood in a warehouse gathering dust and perhaps eventually becoming out of date or obsolete. In product management, wasted inventory could mean completed features that have not yet been launched or not properly rolled out. Wasted inventory could also refer to unused sections of code, irrelevant test scripts or out of date documentation. Unused “stuff” gets forgotten about, but builds up over time, consuming testing, development and infrastructure resource without delivering any extra value.

Defects

Defects refer to a product not meeting the specifications expected by the customer. Defects can consume an inordinate amount of time and money, not to mention the loss of goodwill amongst users. The later defects are spotted the more costly they become to resolve. Defects take many forms, perhaps the intended function cannot be completed at all or not within the required timeframe. Generally, the larger the code base and the more features the product has — the more defects will occur over time. Defects can be caused by product changes, but also external factors such as updates to product components or the underlying infrastructure.

Motion

Motion wastage is any movement made that could have been used for another purpose. In manufacturing we think of wasted journeys or excessive movement by factory workers. In product management, motion waste could relate to teams needing to use multiple tools to understand a single set of requirements or to provide progress reporting. Consolidating on a standard tool set should help eliminate this type of motion waste. Where possible integrate disperate systems to pull and push data to provide a single view of work in progress.

Over-processing

Lean manufacturing relies on products delivering value to the customer, but not over-engineering any product. For mature products, the cost-benefit of constantly adding more features may not check out versus designing and implementing a completely new product line to address a different customer challenge. Consistently check customers “willingness to pay” for significant uplifts in current products.

Waiting

This is any form of waiting that must be done to complete a task. Developers and testers are precious resources. How often are they waiting for a key question to be answered, a clarification on requirements or a necessary design asset? Are features waiting to be released because of an artificially imposed release cadence?

Transportation

In manufacturing, we think of transportation waste as wasted journeys. In product management, this could equate to unnecessary in-person team meetings, demonstrations or product training sessions. We could also think about the process of deploying code and configuration from one environment to another.

Think about your own end to end product management processes and try to identify examples covering these seven types of waste. Quantify each one and prioritize the most egregious forms. Most forms of waste can be eliminated or reduced through training, consolidation, the application of tools and automation or simply by being aware they exist and working with your team to eradicate them. Demonstrating the reduction of waste with the ability to back this up with hard evidence can be extremely motivating and allows you to increase the overall value you can deliver to your users.