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

What should be the outcome of an estimation discussion?


Estimation discussions, in my experience, have one very valuable outcome. It's not the story points, but it's the conversations and interactions that happen around the story details. As the team builds familiarity with the user context, business goals, existing framework, technology options, assumptions, and so on, there are valuable ideas that take shape.

Breaking down a user story into tasks (or things to do) helps the team align on the best implementation approach. The pros and cons of an approach are discussed. The trade-offs (what we will not get by following this plan) are discussed. Assumptions are challenged. Risks are identified. Ideation kicks in. The most important outcomes from an estimation session are these ideas, tasks, and questions.

So, if we flip this around, and conduct implementation discussions instead of estimation sessions, then we can expect that estimates will be just one minor detail to derive. We saw in Chapter...