I got this book from my office boss as part of the organization's continued learning on Lean and Agile. For some (fortunate) reason, perhaps because I was also reading two books - one was about starting a small business and another about living a 'Suitcase Entrepreneur' lifestyle - I find the Lean book both interesting and paradigm-changing.
Doing projects for the past 20+ years mostly to either build solutions and applications or implement them in some business areas, it didn't occur to me that my past teams could have done it in a much leaner, agile, faster and cost-effective way.
But I guess why I particularly liked it is that, as part of my early retirement advanced planning, I was toying the idea of starting my own business be it a farm, a tea-house, a coffee shop or an outdoor school. And this book is gold and the acquired wisdom is an excellent addition to my decades of Project Management and product development experience.
So here's my top highlights for the book.
1. Lean can win. I've proven long ago that being lean can really drive efficiency and speed, remembering that era sometime in the late 90's where doing an SAP implementation for a business category in a manufacturing plant was only done by two people. One was me!
But reading the book revealed more than just having a lean team. It's being lean in process, in product development scope, in budget among other things. In recent times, I've seen teams do projects with large resource pool, budget and long time table. Something that is known to be inefficient, costly and have caused delays in getting the ROI.
2. The Lean Movement is also about collective human progress. This thought struck me. I wasn't expecting a sort of advocacy message but in the concluding chapter - Eric clearly shares a grand thought that if we can collectively reduce or eliminate human effort waste, in building useless products (that customer will not want), in executing projects or tasks that painfully take a long time, or wasting effort in useless process like vanity KPI reviews, product design and build that will not add value, among other things - the world will be so much more productive!
3. Fail small, fail fast, repeat 'til you get it right. This is old but hard to reapply to big organization or at industrial scale. And we sometimes forget the power of iterations even in our own work. I mean, who likes to report a 'failure', one would rather wait (for a long, long time) to 'perfect' a design or plan so 'everything will be successful' in the end. Then if not, we can always blame someone or something, right?! The cycle of build-measure-learn is a powerful tool for business product development, as well as for new entrepreneur that aims to produce new product be it tangible buy-from-grocery types, a less tangible service like maid-to-order house-cleaning, or smartphone apps.
4. He/she who adapts the quickest, survives. Or wins! This is also old but how do you apply the principle in business? The iterative cycle described above - when combined with market testing, will allow product teams to quickly adjust their plans. Incremental and iterative cycle are keys to successful innovation. Measure-learn is about understanding and validating what the market wants. Will they buy this product? Will they use this app feature? Are they willing to subscribe and pay?
5. Pivot - the power to decide whether to change or stop before a catastrophic defeat! This is somewhat new for me. To embed a pivot review in a development cycle compared to the traditional go/no-go gate review. This is more deliberate especially as strategies are reassessed or redefined versus the vision that they support. Of course this decision point will only work best if you are looking at the right metrics and something that merits another long discussion. As we said "data-based decision", but finding the right set of KPIs (the 'data') would be crucial.
So if this set of thoughts interests you, I really suggest reading the book end-to-end.
Cheers!
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