Reflections on the Lean Product and Process Development Exchange Executive Panel Webinar
I was a recent participant on the executive panel for LPPDE, the Lean Product and Process Development Exchange, discussing challenges and strategies for effective transformation.
I will share more of my perspectives from this webinar, but here is a clip of me answering our initial question about the challenges in overcoming deployment. I believe one of the biggest is that in a product development environment, there is a great distance in both time and space between problem occurrence and problem detection. This makes experimentation difficult, understanding cause and effect difficult, and makes us more susceptible to finger-pointing.
Some of the other barriers that we discussed include:
- Connecting the change to the business results, not doing this because it’s lean, but because it produces better results
- Getting top-down and middle management buy-in, where middle management can often be where transformational change goes to die
- We have an unlearning problem, where both behaviors and mental models about how product development works have to be unlearned
- We often lack patience, as some of these changes take a while, including an entire product development cycle to truly take effect
- As is true with many changes, we fail to make clear and help people understand the why
Some of the advice from various members of the group around making progress includes:
- Pick a gateway behavior that begins a habit at a small level.
- Ask curious questions and not just status questions in your next review.
- State the why out loud as frequently as you need to stand up real visual management that helps make both the work and problems visible.
- Run a painful launch retrospective to truly understand what can be learned from the struggle.
- Tighten the front-end gate and make sure there’s rigor early in the process before we commit a lot of resources.
- Decompose long programs into pace milestones, which I often refer to as increasing the granularity of the work.
- Shift the management system from only rewarding results to rewarding learning.
- Establish product cadence to neutralize the long cycle times and unresolved problems.
- Engage middle management as owners and not just bystanders or passive participants in the transformation process.
These are just a few takeaways from this webinar. I would love to hear your own thoughts.
If you want to learn more about lean product development, here are a few articles I’ve written on my blog post. I also have episodes of our podcast with thought leaders on lean product development, including Scott Willoughby, who led the James Webb Space Telescope, Rick Pedersen, Norbert Majerus, and Durwood Sobek. Finally, you can attend the upcoming LPPDE Summit (September 28–October 1).