Winning with product management in 2024 via lean leverage

It’s time for the inessential to exit, stage left.

More. Better. Faster. Cheaper. The tireless pursuit of ever-increasing product output just keeps going and going.

Not only does it persist, it seems to be amplifying in intensity. This monotonous, beating drum is driven louder by a heightened competitive environment. And the recent rise in artificial intelligence is speeding up the rhythm to a frenetic pace. 

This beat is not an energizing rhythm. What I see in most cases is exhausted product teams, barely hanging on. Output has become the goal, the anti-purpose that doesn’t inspire. The resulting demanding pace produces unsustainable, empty, ineffective results.

Product professionals these days talk a lot about outcomes over output. But let’s be honest, many of us simply don’t walk the talk. Could 2024 could be the year this changes?

For this year to be any different, we need a jolt in a different direction. Instead of doing more, we need to do something non-instinctual. We need to do less, better. This is how we will achieve more of the outcomes we desire.

I have begun to refer to achieving more with less as lean leverage. Let’s start by defining what this term means to me and then set the stage for how to apply it, starting now.

What is lean leverage?

We can define lean leverage by first exploring the choice of words in the name—lean and leverage.

Lean has its origins in continuous improvement and respect for people. The core of lean is to produce what is required, removing excess to the delight of creators and consumers. With lean, you focus your effort on the essential in a relentless pursuit of perfection of this ideal.

To have leverage is to maximize the value you get out of the effort you put in. A high-leverage action means you get peak returns on the essential work you put in. We all desire our actions to create the highest possible outcomes.

When you put lean and leverage together, you get a perfect marriage of two concepts. You want actions with the lowest waste and the highest respect for people. And you need those actions to have maximal leverage.

Lean leverage is about simplifying. It is what happens when you remove the inessential to deliver maximum outcomes. When the superfluous is out of the way, you get two benefits. First, you don’t waste energy on what is not needed, and second, you focus more quality time on what needs to be done.

We want…no…we need lean leverage in today’s competitive landscape.

What problems does lean leverage seek to solve?

Before outlining benefits, let’s grasp the current dismal state of product teams. Below are some common realities, driven by the pursuit of deadline-driven output:

• Agile framework installations with no context customization and no real change.
• No time or space to improve the system used to get work done.
• Slow decisions made by a centralized command and control.
• Complex webs of dependencies manifested by a proliferation of silos across the organization.
• Endless meetings to report status, coordinate dependencies, and recover from failure.
• Minimal to non-existent customer engagement.
• No time to iterate on solutions based on learning.
• Corners get cut to meet deadlines, resulting in large amounts of quality debt and a high support burden.
• Issues are kept hidden and don’t get resolved.
• All needs are priority one and are started in parallel.
• Work is shelved in the face of an obstacle, starting new work rather than removing the obstacle.
• Team members work in isolation on separate tasks to stay busy in their specialty.
• More time and effort is spent on deterministic planning rather than learning by doing.
• Polishing and adding to existing processes, rather than simplifying.
• Not taking time to automate repetitive tasks, opting to continue them indefinitely.
• Turfs and siloes that prevent knowledge cross-pollination.
  

These are just observations off the top of my head. I could keep going. As you can see, there is much room for improvement. 

We need to stop today’s soul-depleting realities. They only serve to demoralize teams and kill any hope of customer delight. Fortunately, lean leverage aims to crush each of these problems. 

What are the benefits of lean leverage?

When you pursue lean leverage, your product team experiences a much different reality: 

• Learning. You will experiment early and often. This allows you to leverage customer-centric, inexpensive learning loops. You will emerge the simple, right solution, sooner.
• Improvement. You will make the time and space to continuously pursue the simplest system of work. You will emerge the easiest path to produce the shortest lead time and the highest quality.
• Atomic Focus. You will start small and iterate to completion. Your focus will narrow to one thing at a time and arrive at the right solution sooner with quality. 
• Teamwork. Without silos, you will experience peak cross-functional collaboration and collective ownership.
• Engagement. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose will drive you toward higher and sustainable team effectiveness. 
• Safety. You will be safe to raise problems, ask for help, and take action without fear of repercussions. 
  

This new and greatly improved reality removes the inessential. In return, it generates a flywheel of opportunities for leverage. Your value potential expands as your customers, stakeholders, and teams reap the rewards of:

• Increased Outcomes. You will learn rapidly and deliver the right thing, in the right way, at the right time. Your customers will adopt what you build, keep using it, and tell others about it.
• Increased Impact. Delighting customers sooner will get you to the business impacts you desire sooner.
• Simplified Output. Delivering the essential in a simple way emerges usable, useful, and used solutions sooner with less effort.
• Soaring Engagement. High levels of autonomy, mastery, and purpose will drive joy in teams and drive momentum.
  

You will be lighter, move quicker, pivot on a dime, and reach your goals sooner. And it all comes with less stress and effort by removing the extraneous.

What could get in the way of lean leverage succeeding?

Make no mistake, pursuing lean leverage forces a culture shift. Even with the compelling benefits, it will struggle to gain a foothold against any contrary prevailing culture.

It’s not lean leverage that is the problem. Any attempt at dethroning an embedded culture will be met with strong headwinds. An existing system not supportive of lean leverage will reject the foreign element. 

Here are some common change failure pathways to watch out for along with remedies to avoid them:

1: Mass Installations. A common pitfall is to use surface-level training or playbooks as the main change vehicle. These force change in a one-size-fits-all manner, all at once. Instead, seek to customize the change to context. This is best done through co-creation with those who are changing, one team or area at a time. The change impact radius is smaller, and the momentum will build through small wins.

2: Local Optimization. It’s a mistake to focus too narrowly, such as focusing only on technology or only at the team level. Behavior change focusing solely on a part rather than the whole will flame out fast. Instead, seek to fundamentally change all aspects required to go from concept to cash. Seek to have no function or level left behind.

3: Top-down Ambivalence. Nothing stops change quicker than the absence of executive and middle management buy-in. Education and behavior change is as important for management as it is for those on the ground. Bring the entire vertical slice of the organization through the change together. 

4: Old Habit Hoarding. Holding on to old, irrelevant behaviors while adding new behaviors is not sustainable. And it makes a retreat to the familiar too convenient. Letting go of old habits is difficult, but necessary. Shed the weight of old habits to enable space for new lean leverage behaviors to take flight. 

5: Change Theater. Changing titles, altering vocabulary, or adding ceremony without modifying behavior is an illusion. You might as well change nothing. Deep change requires time and deliberate practice. You have to put in the effort to learn new habits that fundamentally simplify the system of how work gets done. 

Anyone familiar with recent failed transformation efforts will recognize these patterns. If you can avoid these obstacles, you will clear a path and invite lean leverage habits to form.

Making it a reality

Lean leverage. Can this shift be the key to finally move from an unhealthy output morass to a fulfilling outcome oasis? Time will tell, but I believe it has a solid chance of success. Removing excess leaves room for what matters; it’s a logical, low-risk bet.

We started this post with the current unfortunate demands on today’s product teams: more, better, faster, and cheaper. Just a one-word change to this can make a big difference: less. Less is more, less is better, less is faster, and less is cheaper.

Less is more, less is better, less is faster, and less is cheaper.

If you are like me, I’m sure this post is whetting your appetite for details. As 2024 unfolds, I aim to unfold the experiments and ideas to shape this concept. A few areas I already have in mind are:

• Ending the proxy game and connecting teams with customers
• Dissolving silos to amplify teamwork and unleash value flow
• Democratizing problem-solving to crush obstacles
• Integrating AI to amplify capability
• Simplifying through atomic focus to finish what you start
• Harvesting evidence to simplify your path

Will you join me in the pursuit of lean leverage? Tell me what ideas you have. And stay tuned for more content from me this year on how I’m fighting to make this a reality for those in my circle.

My 2024 lean leverage journey so far

The momentum is building. I am documenting my journey to amplify lean leverage with weekly articles. → Click here to read them all.

My best posts of 2023

Below are my five most popular articles of 2023. These also are highly supportive of the concept of lean leverage. Give them a read for yourself to find out more.

Nine ways to revive collaboration and unleash the full promise of agility

Why full-stack product ownership may be your missing link

Agility for latecomers: is it too late or a new opportunity?

8 Essential product mindset enablers to unlock you success

Agility coaching redefined—meet my continuous improvement GPT

This post was originally published on Medium.