Competitive product development is all about listening, learning and executing faster and better than the competition. This is especially true in the software industry, where product updates must sometimes be provided within hours.
Tomorrow I am giving a talk here in San Diego about Knowledge-Driven Product Development. I will discuss how product development should be viewed as a Learning Game. Instead of focusing on activities, we should be looking at knowledge flow and how to remove obstacles to learning. In order to do this effectively, we should look beyond processes and focus on the product development function as an integrated system - a Product Development System.
A Lean Product Development System is one that facilitates rapid learning with a minimum of waste and bureaucratic obstacles. Every organization that wishes to remain competitive should have a strategy for pursuing such an ideal, or risk being left behind by smarter, nimbler competitors.
What does a Lean Journey consist of for a Product Development System? I think there are five basic questions that must be asked and answered - again and again:
- What is the known and potential demand out there?
- How well are we doing now?
- How can we solve the problems that remain in order to meet demand?
- What should our focus be on right now?
- What can we do to answer these questions faster and better?
These questions look suspiciously like the five classic Lean principles, Value, Value Stream, Flow, Pull, and Perfection. We really need to look at the product development system as a whole, however. It is more than a portfolio of value streams - it is a system for organizational learning.
This has significant implications for leadership in product development. Instead of asking how we can get more efficient, ask about how we can learn faster. Instead of focusing testing on finding defects, think more broadly about how we can use it as a source of information about how well our design solutions are working. Instead of asking for elaborate project plans, ask for a tree diagram showing what problems and subproblems need to be solved.
When product development is a Learning Game, the successful leader is more like a coach or a cool professor in graduate school who is facilitating learning. problem-solving, and growth for a team. Leaders who continue to treat product development as "production work" do so at their professional peril.
Frode L. Odegard is the Founder and CEO of the
Lean Software Institute.
