Lean

What’s the single key advantage that start-ups consistently hold over big businesses? One which allows them to move faster, and change course quicker than large corporations? It isn’t talent or creativity, and it’s certainly not resources. Start-up nimbleness comes from employee empowerment – a culture where people at all levels of the organization feel free Read more »

By now, you’ve almost certainly heard about Continuous Delivery, and some of the benefits it brings to development and product teams. Claire Mitchell (Senior Product Manager at the BBC) talks about how her team at the BBC embraced Continuous Delivery and, as a result, felt huge benefits to their ability to build product and integrate as a team. Read more »

In 2008, the Financial Times was redesigned in a supposedly Agile way – it took four years, they ended up just shipped what they had, and was not considered a resounding success. Bede McCarthy talks about the latest attempt to update the FT.com site, and how they’re getting it right. The team has hit every major milestone on Read more »

Adam Thomas is Chief Product Officer at Storyful, who refer to themselves as “the human algorithm” – monitoring the social web, tracking content and looking for signals to discover news-worthy events, or content that brands, financial analysts, advertisers etc. can use. This data and content is all verified, validated and corroborate by real humans, and then pushed Read more »

Paul Lomax has been with Dennis Publishing for 5 years, and experienced first-hand the problem of bringing a focus on technology into a business in an industry that has not historically been at all technology-focused. So how do you do technology if you’re not a technology company? Part of the challenge is that you’re unlikely Read more »

How do you get everybody in your company to understand your customers — especially if you’re not 100% certain yourself? You ‘got out of the building’ and you’ve talked to your customers, but how do you communicate and build on what you’ve learned when you get back? Traditionally this meant a lot of up front Read more »

Lean UX and Lean product design came about about because it is really hard to work out what customers actually want. This is especially true for digital products, as the field is still really just getting started. At it’s core, Lean is about finding better ways to build products with a higher rate of success. Read more »

Building hardware products presents a set of unique challenges and Kristoffer Lawson, founder and CEO of Solu, found it all the more interesting coming to hardware from his background in software engineering. While it certainly takes more time to build and prototype products in hardware, the process is getting faster and the costs continue to fall. Not Read more »

Let me get this out of the way: I love Kanban. And this isn’t for any of the usual reasons, such as because it’s a visual management tool, or because it enhances work in progress control, or even because it’s self-managed. I love Kanban because it allows me to not have project management in my product team. Read more »

How do you know whether a product idea is going to succeed if you build it and take it to market?  If you’ve ever been part of a startup, or if your organization has launched a new products, you know how precarious the effort can be. Sure, there is Lean methodology for discovering product-market fit, Read more »