Global Product Management Talk

Global Product Management Talk


Developing The Lean Spec: Episode 10

January 26, 2017

Cindy F. Solomon of SUPA Product Academy chats with Malcolm Knapp of the Engineer Accelerator to implement the process that Malcolm teaches for creating the vision for a product prior to building it and the value to product managers of being trained to implement this process to increase effectiveness and efficiency of the product development phase and excellent product outcomes.

In this 10th discussion of the series, the first in 2017, Cindy and Malcolm discuss how specific you need to be at that moment in the product process. Many people speak about the product in a vague way and there is a necessary level of specificity required to determine actionable items. There's a skill to knowing how far/deep to go at this moment in the process - it is a challenge to not jump to (for engineers) coding or identifying materials - we don't want to spend time designing what we already know before we uncover what we don't know - the Lean Spec guarantees integration with other parts of the process aligning across functions. System thinking, the proper hierarchical organization of knowledge of what is known about the product (product experience is the gestalt of the hardware, software and the design - part of what you're trying to do is talk about "experience" but not only the end-user perspective, but the objective creation of the product).

Listeners are invited to join the discussion, ask questions and provide your own perspectives and approaches for what process and tools you currently employ to arrive at a cross functional and validated vision of the product prior to build.