Lean product development
Building the right things is hard and often underestimated. You cannot just ask potential customers what they want. What people say they want, what they really want, and what they are willing to pay for, are three completely different things.
Lean product development was introduced by Toyota to address challenges in their product development approach, notably the lack of innovation, long development cycles, and many reproduction cycles (Ward, Allen 2007 p. 3).
Lean product development is built on cross-functional teams that take an incremental approach. The main characteristics are as follows:
- Work in small batches.
- Make the flow of work visible.
- Gather and implement customer feedback.
- Team experimentation.
As you can see, this completely aligns with what we've learned in Part 1, Lean Management and Collaboration. The new dimension is customer feedback and experimentation. But without the ability to work in small batches...
