A massive disconnect exists today between consumers and providers. As consumers, we have a greater selection of higher quality goods and services to choose from, yet our experience of obtaining and using these items is more frustrating than ever. At the same time, companies find themselves with declining customer loyalty, greater challenges in fulfilling orders, and a general sense of dissatisfaction in connecting with their customers. In LEAN SOLUTIONS, lean production experts Womack and Jones show consumers and companies alike how they can align their goals to achieve greater value with less waste.
The missing manual on how to apply Lean Startup to build products that customers love The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a startup or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice. The Lean Startup movement has contributed new and valuable ideas about product development and has generated lots of excitement. However, many companies have yet to successfully adopt Lean thinking. Despite their enthusiasm and familiarity with the high-level concepts, many teams run into challenges trying to adopt Lean because they feel like they lack specific guidance on what exactly they should be doing. If you are interested in Lean Startup principles and want to apply them to develop winning products, this book is for you. This book describes the Lean Product Process: a repeatable, easy-to-follow methodology for iterating your way to product-market fit. It walks you through how to: Determine your target customers Identify underserved customer needs Create a winning product strategy Decide on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Design your MVP prototype Test your MVP with customers Iterate rapidly to achieve product-market fit This book was written by entrepreneur and Lean product expert Dan Olsen whose experience spans product management, UX design, coding, analytics, and marketing across a variety of products. As a hands-on consultant, he refined and applied the advice in this book as he helped many companies improve their product process and build great products. His clients include Facebook, Box, Hightail, Epocrates, and Medallia. Entrepreneurs, executives, product managers, designers, developers, marketers, analysts and anyone who is passionate about building great products will find The Lean Product Playbook an indispensable, hands-on resource.
Leaders are now recognizing that product design is the primary driver of success. They are making it their primary target in their quest for delivering customers more value at less cost. Now Bart Huthwaite, founder of the Institute for Lean Design and recognized as America's Lean Design Coach, show you how, step-by-step, to create lean products and services right from the start. He reveals success secrets and a road map for integrating lean design with six sigma design for powerful results
“At last! A book about errors, flubs, and screwups that pushes beyond platitudes and actually shows how to enlist our mistakes as engines of learning, growth, and progress. Dive into The Mistakes That Make Us and discover the secrets to nurturing a psychologically safe environment that encourages the small experiments that lead to big breakthroughs.” DANIEL H. PINK, #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF DRIVE, WHEN, AND THE POWER OF REGRET We all make mistakes. What matters is learning from them, as individuals, teams, and organizations. The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation is an engaging, inspiring, and practical book by Mark Graban that presents an alternative approach to mistakes. Rather than punishing individuals for human error and bad decisions, Graban encourages us to embrace and learn from them, fostering a culture of learning and innovation. Sharing stories and insights from his popular podcast, “My Favorite Mistake,” along with his own work and career experiences, Graban show how leaders can cultivate a culture of learning from mistakes. Including examples from manufacturing, healthcare, software, and two whiskey distillers, the book explores how organizations of all sizes and industries can benefit from this approach. In the book, you'll find practical guidance on adopting a positive mindset towards mistakes. It teaches you to acknowledge and appreciate them, take necessary measures to avoid them while gaining knowledge from the ones that occur. Additionally, it emphasizes creating a safe environment to express mistakes and encourages responding constructively by emphasizing learning over punishment. Developing a culture of learning from mistakes through psychological safety is essential in effective leadership and organizational success. Leaders must lead by example and demonstrate kindness to themselves and others by accepting their own blunders instead of solely pushing for more courage from their team. This approach, as Graban highlights, fosters a positive and productive work environment. The Mistakes That Make Us is a must-read for anyone looking to create a stronger organization that produces better results, including lower turnover, more improvement and innovation, and better bottom-line performance. Whether you are a startup founder or an aspiring leader in a larger company, this book will inspire you to lead with kindness and humility, and show you how mistakes can make things right. Table of Contents: Chapter One: Think Positively Chapter Two: Admit Mistakes Chapter Three: Be Kind Chapter Four: Prevent Mistakes Chapter Five: Help Everyone to Speak Up Chapter Six: Choose Improvement, Not Punishment Chapter Seven: Iterate Your Way to Success Chapter Eight: Cultivate Forever Afterword End Notes List of Podcast Guests Mentioned in the Book More Praise for the Book ”Making mistakes is not a choice. Learning from them is. Whether we admit it or not, mistakes are the raw material of potential learning and the means by which we progress and move forward. Mark Graban's The Mistakes That Make Us is a brilliant treatment of this topic that helps us frame mistakes properly, detach them from fear, and see them as expectations, not exceptions. This book's ultimate contribution is helping us realize that creating a culture of productive mistake-making accelerates learning, confidence, and success.” TIMOTHY R. CLARK, PHD, AUTHOR OF THE 4 STAGES OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY, CEO OF LEADERFACTOR
Despite enormous investments of time and money, are we making a dent on the social and environmental challenges of our time? What if we could exponentially increase our impact? Around the world, a new generation is looking beyond greater profits, for meaningful purpose. But, unlike business, few social interventions have achieved significant impact at scale. Inspired by the modern innovation practices, popularized by bestseller The Lean Startup, that have fueled technology breakthroughs touching every aspect of our lives, Lean Impact turns our attention to a new goal - radically greater social good. Social change is far more complicated than building a new app. It requires more listening, more care, and more stakeholders. To make a lasting difference, solutions must be embraced by beneficiaries, address root causes, and include an engine that can accelerate growth to reach the scale of the need. Lean Impact offers bold ideas to reach audacious goals through customer insight, rapid experimentation and iteration, and a relentless pursuit of impact. Ann Mei Chang brings a unique perspective from across sectors, from her years as a tech executive in Silicon Valley to her most recent experience as the Chief Innovation Officer at USAID. She vividly illustrates the book with real stories from interviews with over 200 organizations across the US and around the world. Whether you are a nonprofit, social enterprise, triple bottom line company, foundation, government agency, philanthropist, impact investor, or simply donate your time and money, Lean Impact is an essential guide to maximizing social impact and scale.
UX design has traditionally been deliverables-based. Wireframes, site maps, flow diagrams, content inventories, taxonomies, mockups helped define the practice in its infancy.Over time, however, this deliverables-heavy process has put UX designers in the deliverables business. Many are now measured and compensated for the depth and breadth of their deliverables instead of the quality and success of the experiences they design. Designers have become documentation subject matter experts, known for the quality of the documents they create instead of the end-state experiences being designed and developed.So what's to be done? This practical book provides a roadmap and set of practices and principles that will help you keep your focus on the the experience back, rather than the deliverables. Get a tactical understanding of how to successfully integrate Lean and UX/Design; Find new material on business modeling and outcomes to help teams work more strategically; Delve into the new chapter on experiment design and Take advantage of updated examples and case studies.
"On Time-In Full" is an important work. Tim McLean provides an easy to follow practical approach to building a highly performing supply chain" -Drew Locher, Shingo Prize Winning Author and Lean Thinker The most fundamental requirement for a manufacturing or distribution business is to deliver to customers what they want, in the quantity they want, when they want it. It doesn’t matter how good your product is, how much the customer likes your salesperson, how slick your marketing campaign is: If your customers can’t get what they want when they want it, they will get it elsewhere, and your business will be in serious trouble. On Time in Full: Achieving Perfect Delivery with Lean Thinking in Purchasing, Supply Chain and Production Planning is a step-by-step practical guide to designing a Lean Supply Chain that will deliver what your customers need, when they need it, every time. Timothy McLean shares his three decades of Lean supply chain experience -- In simple straightforward language, he explores the reasons why supply chains fail to deliver and what you can do about it. On Time In Full includes practical guidance for tackling the big issues affecting supply chains including: How to understand your extended supply chain with a value stream map The role of forecasting in your supply chain and how to get a meaningful forecast Calculating the right level of inventory for your business Scheduling daily production to meet demand Managing suppliers and your supply chain at home and internationally Selecting and making the best use out of an ERP system Designing an efficient distribution network The book is full of practical case studies and examples as well as references for further study. On Time, In Full is the complete guide to setting up a supply chain that works.
Lean Management Solutions for Contemporary Manufacturing Operations: Applications in the automotive industry covers recent techniques aimed at improving manufacturing activities in automotive factories in the time of the fourth industrial revolution. The book informs the reader about some improvements in hard skills (such as technical concepts, new tools, processes, and applied designs), as well as soft skills (strategic planning and the psychology of motivating human resources in manufacturing setups). The book also presents insight for managers who are working with a niche of employees with disabilities with respect to the automotive industry. Topics in the book include: Application of Graph Theory in Workplace Design Applied Design Disability and the 4th Industrial Revolution People Development, Motivation & Results Low Cost Logistics Solutions Agile Methodologies in Manufacturing Projects This book is a concise, informative reference which updates the reader on recent strategies to maximize productivity in the auto manufacturing sector.
Use Lean Techniques to Integrate Enterprise Systems Faster, with Far Less Cost and Risk By some estimates, 40 percent of IT budgets are devoted to integration. However, most organizations still attack integration on a project-by-project basis, causing unnecessary expense, waste, risk, and delay. They struggle with integration “hairballs”: complex point-to-point information exchanges that are expensive to maintain, difficult to change, and unpredictable in operation. The solution is Lean Integration. This book demonstrates how to use proven “lean” techniques to take control over the entire integration process. John Schmidt and David Lyle show how to establish “integration factories” that leverage the powerful benefits of repeatability and continuous improvement across every integration project you undertake. Drawing on their immense experience, Schmidt and Lyle bring together best practices; solid management principles; and specific, measurable actions for streamlining integration development and maintenance. Whether you’re an IT manager, project leader, architect, analyst, or developer, this book will help you systematically improve the way you integrate—adding value that is both substantial and sustainable. Coverage includes Treating integration as a business strategy and implementing management disciplines that systematically address its people, process, policy, and technology dimensions Providing maximum business flexibility and supporting rapid change without compromising stability, quality, control, or efficiency Applying improvements incrementally without “Boiling the Ocean” Automating processes so you can deliver IT solutions faster–while avoiding the pitfalls of automation Building in both data and integration quality up front, rather than inspecting quality in later More than a dozen in-depth case studies that show how real organizations are applying Lean Integration practices and the lessons they’ve learned Visit integrationfactory.com for additional resources, including more case studies, best practices, templates, software demos, and reference links, plus a direct connection to lean integration practitioners worldwide.
