5 Lean Leadership Principle Every Product Managers Must Know

 Lean principles help businesses to get their valuable products to market faster. These lean principles aim to optimize product development and maximize a product's value to customers.

Further, as a product manager, applying lean principles requires a shift in your mindset and organization.

In this blog, we will discuss some lean management principles that allow managers to bring products to market as quickly as possible. 

1. Respect people

Respecting people is a driving factor in lean management. Unfortunately, this lean management principle is often overshadowed by other demands. Refocusing on respect in a sector where developers are handled like commodities is critical.

A team's foundation should be built on respect. A team is deliverable when there is effective communication, continuous training, and onboarding procedures. 

An excellent lean manager promotes respect and applies respectful practices through training procedures, prompt responses, and specific deadlines. Teams that effectively apply this leadership principle have these qualities in common:

• Proactive communication (not reactive)

• Balanced responsibilities among team members

• Regular check-ins on professional progress, growth, or blockers

• A shared mission and sense of collaboration

2. Eliminate waste

Eliminating things that are not necessary and do not offer value to the customer is another important lean management principle. This also applies to product modifications that cause confusion or discontent among customers. Anything that might waste time should be reassessed.

This lean concept seeks to reduce significant waste in the software development process. The following are some of a development team's most typical trash examples:

• Unclear or inconsistent messaging for marketing and delivery dates

• Unnecessary code functionalities

• Changes to a product without announcements or customer training

• Promising functionalities before there is a plan in place

3. Build quality through testing. 

This lean leadership principle aims to create strategies that work and produce goods of higher caliber. Building for quality will bring discipline to your team because all your efforts should focus on providing value to the customer. Effective lean teams have had great success using the following tools and tactics to adhere to this principle:

• Constant user and quality analyst input

• Software testing regularly for each prerequisite

• Pair programming to eliminate wasteful labor

• Automating labor-intensive and error-prone chores

4. Keep your options open.

This lean management principle states that teams should be flexible and keep their options open rather than make uninformed decisions. A lean team is encouraged to take responsibility for researching alternatives and gathering enough data to make good decisions.

Rushing to make large or small decisions can result in wasted time, unhappy team members, and even the loss of a user base. Effective lean teams have the following standards in common:

• They do not make rigid or detailed plans months in advance.

• They do not commit to projects before doing research.

• They do not develop products without aligning them with business requirements.

• They constantly collect data (i.e., user feedback) to assess the success.

5. Always think about optimization.

This lean management principle states that a lean team should optimize for the whole. This helps to avoid common software development pitfalls by focusing on the downstream effect of a task or product decision.

Trying to optimize each part of a product individually is dangerous territory. Instead, a good product manager encourages holistic optimization.

The goal of lean development is to quickly deliver value to customers. This requires the entire stream of work to be optimized. To meet this principle, lean teams have had success with the following strategies:

• Regular software testing and code reviews

• Build development teams that are multi-disciplined and co-located.

• Set reasonable, flexible delivery goals and deadlines.

Conclusion 

At Lean Leaders Plus, we offer the best lean leadership development program that gives you a proper understanding of lean leadership principles. This helps you raise new leaders and embrace a culture of continuous improvement. Visit our official website to learn more.