What is this learning path about, and why is it important?

Since Japanese auto manufacturer Toyota developed and refined the concept of Lean manufacturing and product development, companies and organizations of all sorts have strived to adopt this highly successful methodology to their own environments. So, how can you apply Lean and reap its benefits in your enterprise?

In this learning path, designed for those just becoming familiar with the concept of Lean, you’ll learn how to implement Lean’s iterative, learning-based approach to build better products and be more productive as a team. You’ll examine some simple testing techniques to quickly and inexpensively gather data that can help your organization build a foundation for testing, work more closely with your customers to gather feedback, and provide support to move forward with your projects. Topics addressed include acquiring customer input and incorporating it into your ideas and understanding how to integrate changes to make the best product possible. Your hosts, Kylie Castellaw and Maryam Aidini, also discuss how to address the uneasiness stakeholders and team members might have with Lean experimentation. This is especially important if you often hear colleagues expressing concerns that this is “just another process/buzzword/thing that startups do!” In addition, you’ll look at ideas and a framework to help you to create a Lean experiment of your own.

What you’ll learn—and how you can apply it

What Lean is and how to apply it to create new products
The importance of “failing fast” and what that means
How to design and run Lean experiments on your projects

This learning path is for you because…

You're a product manager tasked with building a successful product and want to get a clearer picture of how that can happen
You're a project contributor (developer, designer, etc.) with experience creating products/software, and you want to make sure you're building the right thing
You have a great idea for a startup or new product at your company but aren’t sure how to determine whether it will be viable in the market
You're an executive who wants to expand the portfolio and to be able to identify which initiatives to invest in; you want product teams to give you more data to empower you to make the right decision

Prerequisites:

You should have a familiarity with basic terminology in the domain of the creation of digital products
You should have a basic understanding of the Lean approach (or previously taken the Introduction to Lean course)

Related Materials:

Read The Lean Enterprise, Chapter 1 Roadmap: http://bit.ly/2nggmcW
Read The Lean Entrepreneur, Chapter 2: http://bit.ly/2AfWuMl
Read the article “The Discipline of Business Experimentation” from Harvard Business Review’s 10 Must Reads 2016: http://bit.ly/2hY4xlO
Watch Agile for Everybody—The Essentials of Agile and Lean: http://bit.ly/2zKVnoh

Materials or downloads needed in advance: None

Testing and Validating Product Ideas with Lean—Understand Product Market Fit and Apply Customer Feedback

Testing and Validating Product Ideas with Lean