Product managers need to have the skill to step between a blurry 30,000 feet view and a close-up fine-grained view. Today, businesses are competing to innovate. Cost is no longer the constraint. Execution is. When competitive advantage for business is paramount, customer delight is non-negotiable, opportunities for impact are abound, product managers have to improvise on their strategy every day. The need to be Agile is about responding to abstract feedback from an ever shifting market. This book 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.
When starting on a new product, it can be quite hard to determine which product idea to pursue. Is there an objective metric to compare an idea’s value? How can we factor engagement from all aspects of the business to create an impactful end-to-end product experience?
The book introduces the concept of investing in Key Business Outcomes as part of the product strategy. It can help elicit the stakeholder’s investment in the execution of an idea. The book is a handy guide for product managers and to anyone embarking on a new product development to align their product strategy with business outcomes and customer impact.
If you are leading a team that is building a new product, then this book is for you. The book is targeted at product managers, functional leads in enterprises, business sponsors venturing into new product offerings, product development teams, and start-up founders.
This part guides the reader to define the Impact Driven Product starting from the business model and working down to the details of Key Business Outcomes, customer value, success metrics and cost versus impact for every feature.
Chapter 1, Identify Key Business Outcomes, addresses defining the business model, understand Key Business Outcomes and defining an Impact Driven Product.
Chapter 2, Invest in Key Business Outcomes, introduces the concept of investing in Key Business Outcomes and the value of business agility in product development.
Chapter 3, Identify the Solution and its Impact on Key Business Outcomes, introduces the concept of feature ideas in a product backlog and introduces a framework to evaluate/ prioritize ideas based on the estimates impact on Key Business Outcomes.
Chapter 4, Plan for Success, addresses the need to define a shared view of success and how to define success criteria for feature ideas.
Chapter 5, Identify the Impact Driven Product, introduces value mapping by defining impact scores and understanding risks and costs of a product feature.
This part guides the reader to define the right metrics to effectively measure product progress and performance.
Chapter 6, Managing the Scope of an Impact Driven Product, addresses the limitations of a Minimum Viable Product and the need to think about the end-to-end product experience when defining product feature scope.
Chapter 7, Track, Measure, and Review Customer Feedback, addresses the importance of customer feedback, feedback channels and how to incorporate feedback into the product backlog.
Chapter 8, Tracking Our Progress, addresses how we can track product performance by measuring qualitative and quantitative metrics and also understanding impact of metrics on product strategy.
This part guides the reader to understand and identify processes that hold product teams from delivering maximum value and why it is important for product teams to discard wasteful processes and stay lean.
Chapter 9, Eliminate Waste – Don’t Estimate!, addresses some common pitfalls of software estimations and the need for teams to embrace/discard the need for estimations based on product context.
Chapter 10, Eliminate Waste – Don’t Build What We Can Buy, addresses the importance of 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.
Chapter 11, Eliminate Waste – Data Versus Opinions, explains the importance for product teams to have a data strategy, common pitfalls with data, and the importance of data driven decision making.
Chapter 12, Is Our Process Dragging Us Down?, addresses the typical process bottlenecks and offers guidelines to overcome these process bottlenecks.
Chapter 13, Team Empowerment, addresses why team empowerment is important for building successful products and what an empowered product team looks like.
Familiarity with Lean Canvas, User Story Maps, Agile principles can help, but are not impediments to the reader.
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here:
https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/LeanProductManagement_ColorImages.pdf
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