Real-World Kanban

The Elevator Pitch

For one of my clients, 50 percent of the products developed never made it to customer usage. That’s 50 percent of hard-earned contracts that never generated any revenue. Improving that rate was obviously critical to survival in the marketplace. Developing things that people want is more important than running faster.

To address this fact, we shifted our approach to product development. Instead of having successive roles (Customer, Business, UX, PO, Team, Operations) drive development, we gave this role to one single person—we let the passionate person behind the idea run with it all the way to the working customer stage.

That’s quite a leap. The challenge was to keep the integrity of the initial idea intact all the way to ...