Embracing Lean Startup Philosophies as a Product Manager

You've heard of Lean Startup, but you might be wondering what does it have to do with me as a Product Manager in a larger organization. Failing fast and pivoting sounds detrimental to my career, right? There's an interesting thread in a LinkedIn Product Management group  on the breakdown of Product Management activities. As you can see from my postings, my take is that the percentage breakdown in allocated time depends on a lot of things - maturity of the product, organization, and so forth. However, the list of activities is actually pretty good. The growing consensus is that a lot of time should be spend in understanding market, industry and competitive research.

That got me thinking about how to get the information needed to reach that understanding. While they might never admit it, so many PMs spend a lot of time doing this kind of research from within the four walls of their office or cubicle, primarily reading analyst reports and the Internet. Sure, they talk to current customers and hear from sales people, but that's the extent of their "research."

Lean Startup  has become the next big thing for entrepreneurs, who are attempting to implement the model with various degrees of success. Steve Blank is the godfather of the movement, which stresses taking an iterative, scientific approach to developing your product to ensure it meets customers' needs. Of course, the movement is now getting some pushback, and more mature companies with existing products have questioned Lean's relevance to their business.

(Not to get too existential, but to those companies who think they are beyond using Lean Startup: is your product without market traction really a product?)

However, if you step back for a moment, what the Lean model is basically telling you is to get out of your cube and find out first hand what's customers really want and need in a methodical, data-driven way to build and maintain a successful product. The key is understanding that managing a product or solution is always an exercise in making decisions with incomplete information. Lean is a reaction to the same issues developers faced with waterfall that eventually created agile development and addition of scrum to the technical lexicon.

Lean : Product Management :: Agile: Engineering

Of course, Lean philosophies can be abused as much as agile. How many times have you heard that there's no design or documentation because "we're agile?" If the only concept people understand about Lean is "pivot," then they're missing the whole point. Lean is not just about pivoting. It's about getting out there and getting as much information as often as possible to make better decisions. As with everything else, it's how you use the concepts, not a rote application of ideas that may or may not be relevant.

With cost-effective tools and approaches to gathering information and testing assumptions, Lean philosophies can be embraced by all product managers in both consumer and B2B looking to become more innovative or to gain marketshare in a mature market. How can you not do this?