I’m participating in a panel at a Brainmates’ Product Talk in Sydney on 14 April. The topic is “The Intersection of Lean Start Up and Product Management"
So, I thought I’d post a few thoughts on the subject in advance. I welcome any comments, and feel free to turn up on the evening - watch the Brainmates events page for details.
The two key things that make Product Management in a corporate environment different from Lean Startup practices are:
1. You can’t fail fast (as much). You can’t fail as freely as a startup, because you can’t take undue risks with your existing customers, brand and experience. You probably can't iterate as rapidly as a startup due to many perfectly valid business and technical constraints.
2. You can’t maintain narrow single-minded focus. You’ve already discovered MVP, and need to scale and diversify. You’re dealing with a myriad of candidate features, maybe even a portfolio of related products.
But
Where the two meet perfectly is the strong emphasis on evidence-based decision-making. That’s what the lean validation board is all about. It’s exactly what happens when Product Managers specify features based on a testable hypothesis.
And
There are plenty of hacks that allow Product Managers to test hypotheses that are as risky as those of a startup, as rapidly as those of a startup. For example, not all tests need to be live in market - you can validate using survey data and tools like those provided by Survey Engine or Qualtrics
Also
Having achieved MVP, established a validated business model, having real customers and the data that comes with them, probably having competitors with some feature overlap, a Product Manager in an established businesses has a fertile field from which to generate hypotheses. You can explore up and down the value chain or supply chain for opportunities to disrupt. You can try to predict where 'the puck is going’ in terms of disruption in the broader customer journey (e.g. 65% of my referred traffic comes from Google now, but I think in 2 years it will be voice search, or wearables, or Pinterest). You can mine the behavioural data of your real, active, paying customers. You can even talk to them.
In short, Lean Startup principles don’t apply perfectly and undigested to Product Management in established business, but there are key areas in which these principles (or a close analog) are extremely worthwhile, and some of the constraints can be easily overcome.
