Lean Innovation — How to develop successful products today [Series — Kickoff]
Why your customer is key to success today more than ever before
This is the first story of my series “Lean Innovation — How to develop successful products today”. It’s about the shift of product development that happens and they methods that have changed over the past 50 years. Like “Lean” manufacturing changed the way companies are building physical products today, Lean and continuous innovation is on the way to become the same standard in the way to invent and develop successful products today. During the next weeks I’m publishing multiple articles on the following topics:
- Why Lean Innovation is the new way to build successful products
- Comparing Lean Innovation methods — Design Thinking vs. Lean Startup vs. Lean UX
- How to create an innovative culture to win in future
- Chase the insights and customer problems, not the solution
- How to deliver a better customer experience and real customer value
- Simple steps to create successful products and services
- How to combine Agile, Design and Lean in parallel
Why I’m writing about this?
We know we learn by trying, sharing, benchmarking and asking questions! My startup team at Pyoneer are big fans and supporters of Design Thinking and the “Lean” movement (self-explaining, as we’re developing software for Design Thinkers). We strongly believe that products and services are something to make life’s easier for people. We’re still stuck in an old world, where too many products are failing. Companies waste needless time, money and especially the energy of employees in build products that nobody wants. Our ultimate goal is to help companies to build products that people will love.
I’m sharing our experience and my thoughts with you — I want you to participate too, as we can all learn from each other!
“But I am completely new to Design Thinking and Lean Innovation… Will I learn something?”
Absolutely! I’m going to share my personal experience of how we:
- used Design Thinking to find a product that solves customer problems
- applied Lean Startup to achieve Product-Market-Fit without having an existing product
- combined Design Thinking and agile software development in an efficient way
The goal if the story is to motivate people to become true innovators and help everyone to understand the principles of good and efficient product innovation. Additionally, I want to give people instruction and share good examples on how to apply Lean Innovation correctly.
I’m working in a corporation and don’t want to found a startup. What do I get out of it?”
No matter if you work for a large company or currently planning to grow your own business. The articles point reasons why and how everyone can become an innovator. Good innovation comes most of the times from the right mindset. Lean only means to reduce waste, nobody needs. A “Lean” production creates only products, when a customer places an order, instead of overproducing and waiting until someone buys something. A “Lean” Innovation does only create products when they notice a customer problem or need that could be solved by a solution. This is valid for people involved in engineering or product development as well as people working in human resource. “Lean” means always to pull, instead of pushing.
One more thing: One principle of innovation is always to make the first step and this one could be yours. Let’s do this!
So, even if you are learning or you do have experience, you can:
- Follow our steps and apply the learnings to your own project
- Share insights, articles, and comments on LinkedIn!
- …Or maybe you can come up with your own articles?
- Ask questions! I’m happy to chat :)
- You might also disagree with some of the thoughts: That’s why I want you to disagree and discuss with us too!
When is it happening?
The series will be released during the next 3 weeks. Follow our posts on the Pyoneer blog, on Medium, on LinkedIn or join the discussion on our Design Thinking and Lean Innovation Community at Slack!
Thanks for reading! What do you think? Leave a comment and share our story!
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 298,432+ people.
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