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 9. Eliminate Waste – Don't Estimate!

Estimations are an integral part of software development. They are required for understanding the costs and effort involved in development, to analyze the impact of scope on time and budgets. When we try to arrive at accurate delivery timelines, we tend to attach a lot of importance to estimates. We try to get very specific and accurate with our estimates. However, an accurate estimate sounds like an oxymoron. Product teams surely need a way to understand costs, complexity, risks, resources, people with specific skills, and so on in order to be able to plan the smartest way to deliver the impact-driven product. It's not just about meeting timelines and staying within budgets. Are product teams wasting their effort and time by focusing on the wrong details (such as accurate estimates)? Are we compromising on individuals and interactions by focusing on tools and processes? How do we keep our focus on outcomes and eliminate wasteful processes that...