agile + lean product management

Breanna Hughes, January 29 2015

breanna@breannahughes.com

Product Management that keeps you Lean and Launchable

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@unbrelievable

#ProductHuntTO

Who am I?

Former Product Manager at Pivotal Labs

Now Product Manager at Wattpad (as of this week!)

What do I know?

• Worked with many clients, from startups to Enterprise to define, design, build and launch their mobile products

• Launched a new product roughly every quarter

• Featured in App Stores

• All using Agile Agile Agile

What do I want you to know?

How Agile + Lean Product Management

can keep you focused on building the right thing

(without using so many buzzwords )

Business Plans! How a lot of people do it

Which actually looks like this

How I like to do it

Many different flavours of agile (in many ugly images)

Agile Manifesto

Individuals and interactions over process and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiations

Responding to change over following a plan

Typical Agile Development Process

Small teams (usually of PM, Dev, Design)

Daily Standups

Weekly Iteration Planning Meeting

1 Week Development Cycle (or iteration)

Test Weekly (or daily! Or TDD!)

Weekly Retrospectives

Weekly Demos

Deploy Every 2-4 Weeks

Sounds great, right?

So why doesn’t everyone do it?

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What is Agile Product Management?

(hint: this is a trick question)

What is Agile Product Management?

Nothing, officially.

“Agile” is a development methodology.

Product Manager (or Owner) is a role within that methodology.

PM + Agile + Lean = <3

I’ll take you through how product management

works in an agile + lean environment

1

7

Wait… what’s lean?

PSSST - READ THAT BOOK!

Where you should start?

• Should this product even be built?

• Validate the riskiest, most important assumptions

Important

Risky

Less Important

Less Risky

Example Assumption:

Our Customers will buy our products from their phone

How can you validate?

“What’s the smallest test I can run to validate my

assumption?”

Validation Examples

User Interviews

• Don’t ask leading questions (ie. Would you prefer to purchase from a website that is specifically designed for your phone?)

• Ask them in past tense: “have you ever done x before?”

• Find out what problems they are experiencing

“Have you ever purchased a product from your phone?”

“Tell me about the experience you had purchasing a

product from your phone”

Validation Examples

Analytics

• If you have a pre-existing product, you’re in luck! Analytics can tell you a lot about what your users are doing

• Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Flurry, Omniture

“Are users buying products from your website using their

phone?”

Validation Examples

Fake Hooks (AKA Smoke and Mirrors)

• You can put up links and “coming soon” pages to determine whether or not a certain feature is desired by users

Place a “tap here for our mobile site” link

Validation Examples

Experiments

• AB or Multi-variable tests when you aren’t completely sure what will work the best

• Optimizely, Taplytics, Google Analytics, Localytics etc

“Will users convert better with a 2 grid product layout or

3?”

Validation Examples

Prototypes

• You can create prototypes without any code

• Get it on device, watch how users interact

• Invision app is the best best best best

http://www.invisionapp.com

Are they confused? What is the biggest stumbling block?

You’ve validated. Now what?

Minimal Working Product

MVP MWP

• Minimal Working Product

• Always build working software

• Start with the feature that has the highest business value

“If we launch today, are these features useful to the end

user?”

Best MWP, Ever. EVER.

Push for Pizza: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id868275506?mt=8

@PushForPizza

Typical User Flow for an E-Commerce App

1. User signs in

2. User browses for Product

3. User selects size, colour

4. Adds to bag

5. Provides deliver information

6. User Provides Payment info

7. User places order

What do you build first?

1. User signs in

2. User browses for Product

3. User selects size, colour

4. Adds to bag

5. Provides deliver information

6. User Provides Payment info

7. User places order

What is the most useful part of this flow?

People always go for this badboy

Prioritization

User places an order

Why?

• A user sign up to their hearts content, but if you can’t purchase them, the app is effectively pointless

We prioritize placing an order above customization and browsing

We could hardcode one product to purchase and ship it

Prioritization

The rest of the flow

You can start to layer other customization elements onto the flow in order of highest business value.

Next could be “user can specify what store they want to pick up the t-shirt”

Then

“User can specify what size of t-shirt”

And so on..

Benefits

Why do this?

• Keeps you focused on the core, most valuable features of the app

• Allows you to make a decision of when to ship throughout the process

• You are always naturally working towards a MVP

• Makes it easy to trade off low priority features (you didn’t spend time on screens no one will use)

Many different flavours of agile (in many ugly images)

Ship Imperfect Product

• You will never get everything perfect the first time

• Or the second time

• Or third

• Or fourth…….

• Agile development allows you the flexibility to respond to issues

Good product management is knowing when it’s “Good

Enough”

Make sure you measure

• Look at analytics to find “problem” areas of your product

• Track analytics from the very beginning

• Track what users might be trying to do

Analytics is a whole other

talk……

Rinse and Repeat

PM Resources on ProductHunt

• http://www.producthunt.com/byosko/collections/product-management-tools

• http://www.producthunt.com/posts/product-manager-handbook

Support other products and other PMs!

Share your learnings, your tips and

tricks.

Thank you!

@unbrelievable

http://ca.linkedin.com/in/breannahughes

breanna@breannahughes.com

If you want to learn more (or enable your

company) on Agile Development, Pivotal Labs is

where it’s at!

http://www.pivotallabs.com