Peter Herr

Long ago (or not so long ago) we spent something like two days in training, we take a test, and after that, we have learned a framework for managing the team. We can explain why what we do is better than waterfall. Stand-ups, 2-week sprints, etc and now everything works great. Most of us know Scrum, because usually — it’s what we learn first.

But as you apply it, you start seeing where it works and where it can potentially, occasionally, just might – fall apart.

Scrum has reached incredible adoption and has made things better for everyone. It’s a worthy framework to know, understand, and practice. Yet it’s just one approach, and arguments have been made that it’s become commonplace. And so if there are so many other methods out there for Product Managers to learn – why stop here?

Product Managers and Leaders who only practice Scrum should take the next step to learn new methods and approaches.

Learn something new.

I’ve personally found mixing approaches and methods to make a huge difference in handling complex problems. I first learned and practiced Kanban and Kaizen years ago while working on new product builds like Whitehouse.gov and We The People Petition app. Your situation and experience will be different, so if faced with something new – you should be prepared by learning and applying multiple methodologies and approaches using a hybrid approach to managing your team. Do what works.

Other management methods to explore are Kanban, Kaizen, Lean, XP, SAFe, Design Sprints, Feature Driven Development, change management, project management (PMP), TDD, DevOps, etc. The list goes on, and it’s worth looking beyond agile itself. It crosses into management philosophies and techniques which can bridge other domains.

Handle complexity with a hybrid approach.

The challenges we face to be successful product managers depend on the context of the problem.

• Situations like these add complexity: startup vs emerging/enterprise, no/few customers vs. many, modern technology vs. legacy, many operational processes vs. few, mature vs. immature DevOps processes.
• Environmental variables like these add complexity: who your customers are, your industry, company culture, product domain & solution fit, technology, and your team.

Advance your career as a Product Manager.

Incorporate multiple approaches to your product management repertoire to:

• Be a more effective manager and leader
• Have a more effective and efficient team; outperform the competition
• Be more marketable

And so, to the managers and leaders who have learned and embraced Agile Scrum, don’t stop here. To be the best you don’t stop learning. Try learning a new approach (like this one).

Have you had success mixing different agile/management approaches? Shoot me a message! I’d love to hear what has worked for you.

Throughout my career, I’ve encountered many teams that struggle to deliver products with adequate quality and efficiency. They’re overworked, missing targets, and customers are frustrated. The Product Managers on those teams were struggling – and they either didn’t know Kanban or if they did, weren’t apply it correctly.

Kanban offers guidelines and principles for how to manage the flow of work. Unlike the more prescriptive Scrum process, Kanban is applied based on your specific situation and helps alleviate bottlenecks and waste. You take the principles of Kanban and just do what works. You apply as you go.

My first experience with Kanban was 6+ years ago and I’ve been using it ever since. I’ve worked with over a dozen product teams & applied a hybrid of methods, and without a doubt, teams who employ Kanban principles deliver more efficiently and have less stress.

These teams work better together because they focus on their flow.

Do What Works. Apply as You Go.

Some background: Kanban translates to signboard/board in Japanese. The Kanban Method originated in the 1940s-50s when Toyota began optimizing its engineering processes based on the same model that supermarkets were using to stock their shelves. Toyota innovated in so many ways – with Just In Time manufacturing, the Toyota Production System, Kaizen, Kanban, and countless other practices that in due time made their way to the West. Japanese management training for the longest time regularly included the management principles and learnings from Toyota. Eventually, around the 80s this was brought to the West and evolved into what we know as Lean, Six Sigma (for manufacturing) and eventually, Kanban was adapted for technology companies by David J. Anderson in the early 2000s.

You can run another process (like scrum), and also apply the principles of Kanban at the same time.

Unlike Scrum’s iterative sprint-based approach, Kanban is about managing a continuous flow through your system. A simple flow could be three steps (new, doing, done) or more complex depending on what makes sense given the context of your service model. For example, your process might look like this:

Backlog > Triage > Selected > Dev > QA > Deploy > Done

Kanban’s goal for the team is to optimize the flow of work through the system to best support the goals of the business. Since I already knew Scrum, running Kanban and mixing the two has enabled me to apply more of a hybrid approach – since oftentimes at this point I could look to either method to choose a path forward that made good business sense.

What Kanban Brings.

• Increase measurable efficiency and productivity (increased throughput)
• Respond faster and more directly meet business demands
• Reduced overburden; executing at a sustainable pace
• Better team morale
• Better quality product and code; reduce defects and rework
• Establish a culture of continuous improvement

Some easy places to start.

If you manage a consistent flow of work from customers (enhancements, new requests, bugs), Kanban can be much easier to practice than Scrum. In Scrum, you may find yourself doing some of the following:

1. Abandoning or breaking a sprint halfway through due to recently surfaced higher priority requests.
2. Delaying high priority items for weeks/months, because it doesn’t fit your current iteration.

New and existing products can run Kanban – but those that are already live (most of us) often lend quite well to Kanban. Demand and priority of issues can fluctuate over time, and managing these prioritizes very closely at the time of entry into your system is advantageous over Scrum’s batched multi-week iterations (which you’d just have to break anyway).

The best way to start is slowly. Adapt and improve a current process by incorporating the five core principles below incrementally, as described in David J Anderson’s book Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business.

Create an Emergent Set of Lean Behaviors with Kanban’s 5 Principles

Principle 1: Visualize Workflow. Your workflow should be visible to the team (hence ‘kanban board’). All of today’s modern ticketing systems support digital boards (Trello, JIRA, TFS, etc). Define your workflow and represent it on the board, and begin pulling tickets into progress.

Principle 2: Limit Your Work in Progress (WIP). Limiting work in progress reduces context switching, communication breakdowns, re-work, duplicate effort, meetings, and missed deadlines (efficiency++). Tickets can continue to be pulled in progress, but only the number of tickets equivalent to the agreed capacity of a system should be put in circulation. Once the agreed-upon capacity is reached, no additional tickets can be pulled to in progress until capacity becomes available.

Principle 3: Measure and Manage Your Flow. Metrics to consider tracking include Lead Time & Cycle Time, Work In Progress, Blockers, Throughput, Escape Defects, Aged Tickets, and times tickets are sent back to Development from Testing. Start basic – perhaps with a few key metrics and iterate. Start by understanding how well your team is performing by establishing a performance baseline and creating a low-effort process to track & report this regularly.

Principle 4: Make Process Policies Explicit. With your team, set standards to define and make clear what the expectations are for delivering work. Putting agreed standards in writing allows growing teams to ensure everyone is following the same process and following best practices. Apply change management practices and give team members a seat at the table.

Principle 5: Continuous Improvement. Use models to recognize improvement opportunities. After setting baseline standards, define a process to maintain said standards, identify improvements, and iterate. Kanban is about evolutionary change. As such, continuous improvement doesn’t mean you have to stop work completely or even slow down – it’s about making small iterative changes to make you, your team, and your organization better. Action Item: Read up on the Theory of Constraints & Kaizen.

Succeed with Kanban.

Kanban, nor any other Agile process for that matter, will guarantee success. Delivery is only part of what makes a successful product leader.

“There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.” – Peter Drucker

Every team, product, and organization is different. The way we employ agile/management principles to our delivery process can and should be adjusted to fit each context.

The ability to drive efficient and effective Product Delivery is a required skill for successful Product Managers. Once you determine your vision, strategy, and decide what to build – learn to improve your execution with Kanban.

The startups I’ve worked for in recent years have had incredible cultures. Even though one is top-down and another quite flat, both are growing fast with excellent qualities that are difficult to replicate.

From his 1985 book Organizational Culture and Leadership, Edgar Schein wrote, “The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture. If you do not manage culture, it manages you, and you may not even be aware of the extent to which this is happening.”

At some companies, inefficient processes and wasted effort can be all too common – and negatively affect margins, efficiency, and team spirit. I believe one of the most important qualities in terms of culture is continuous improvement. Teams have to get better.

Peter Drucker is attributed to having said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”.

Great culture is strategy. And the team is the product.

Teachers of Great Culture

We can look to many amazing examples from both innovators and industry titans for guidance.

Toyota has in recent years been regarded as the most valuable car brand in the world – even after an 80+ year history. The culture created at Toyota – with management principles like Kaizen and 3M, and Toyota Kata – has contributed to not just Toyota’s success but also to the postwar economic success of Japan.

Amazon also practices Kaizen. As the world’s most customer-centric organization, Amazon has had the spirit of lean management since day one. “[Bezos] knew that customers would not pay for waste—and that focus on waste prevention is a fundamental concept of lean.” – When Toyota met e-commerce: Lean at Amazon, McKinsey.

Spotify is well recognized for its Engineering Culture. Check out their infographics and this fantastic description: “This is a journey in progress, not a journey completed, and there’s a lot of variation from squad to squad. So the stuff in the video isn’t all true for all squads all the time, but it appears to be mostly true for most squads most of the time :o)”.

And more… Netflix has its 128-page Culture deck, Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater has radical transparency, and fully distributed Zapier has it’s ebook Ultimate Guide to Remote Work.

Kaizen Philosophy of Continuous Improvement

“Kaizen means improvement. Moreover, it means continuing improvement in personal life, home life, social life, and working life. When applied to the workplace Kaizen means continuing improvement involving everyone – managers and workers alike.” Masaaki Imai, Founder of Kaizen Institute.

Small step improvements allow the organization to build constructive habits including all levels of the organization. So while it may seem counterintuitive, ask smaller questions – and focus on smaller rewards.

Most problems are process-related, not people related. Thus as product managers, we need to constantly reinforce this. Making mistakes is human- learning from them is where we should be accountable. Focus on understanding what went wrong and how the team together can get better from it.

Toyota 3M Process

• Waste (“Muda”): This includes Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Non-used Talent, Transport, Inventories, Motion, and Excess Processing. 
• Overburden or Overutilization (“Muri”): Overutilization leads to mistakes.
• Unevenness or Variation (“Mura”): Results from variation in customer demand, process times, or cycle times.

Toyota Kata

Mike Rother’s book, Toyota Kata, takes the continuous improvement process observed at the Toyota Production System and makes it teachable. Kata are practice routines intended to build strong habits. It goes like this:

1. Understand the Direction
2. Grasp the Current Condition
3. Establish the Next Target Condition
4. Iterate small step improvements toward Target Condition

A great way to apply this is to create “improvement themes” out of retrospectives (as is done at Spotify).

Build Better Products

There are many principles, philosophies, and methods available to help improve your craft. Continuous Improvement is a fundamental quality of great company cultures and great teams alike. Try something new, and just do what works.

As a product leader, getting better doesn’t always guarantee a win. But better teams will build better products.