Book Image

Lean Product Management

By : Mangalam Nandakumar
Book Image

Lean Product Management

By: Mangalam Nandakumar

Overview of this book

Lean Product Management is about finding the smartest way to build an Impact Driven Product that can deliver value to customers and meet business outcomes when operating under internal and external constraints. Author, Mangalam Nandakumar, is a product management expert, with over 17 years of experience in the field. Businesses today are competing to innovate. Cost is no longer the constraint, execution is. It is essential for any business to harness whatever competitive advantage they can, and it is absolutely vital to deliver the best customer experience possible. The opportunities for creating impact are there, but product managers have to improvise on their strategy every day in order to capitalize on them. This is the Agile battleground, where you need to stay Lean and be able to respond to abstract feedback from an ever shifting market. This is where Lean Product Management will help you thrive. Lean Product Management is an essential guide for product managers, and to anyone embarking on a new product development. Mangalam Nandakumar will help you to align your product strategy with business outcomes and customer impact. She introduces the concept of investing in Key Business Outcomes as part of the product strategy in order to provide an objective metric about which product idea and strategy to pursue. You will learn how to create impactful end-to-end product experiences by engaging stakeholders and reacting to external feedback.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Lean Product Management
Contributors
Preface
Another Book You May Enjoy
Index

Chapter 10. Eliminate Waste – Don't Build What We Can Buy

When arriving at a doable / not doable decision for a feature idea, product teams must not shy away for considering whether there is a need to build something at all. If there is an opportunity for teams to buy an existing solution or engage in a partnership with someone who offers a service/solution, we need to be open to considering that.

This decision of build versus buy versus partner versus nothing at all depends to a large extent upon how well our solution meets the needs of the customer and what our cost-impact comparison looks like.

This chapter addresses the following topics:

  • Building what the customer values the most

  • Feature black holes that eat up a team's time

  • Parameters to consider to enable a build versus buy decision