What are the best practices for product discovery and validation in Kanban?

Customer Interviews: Start by talking to your customers to understand their needs and pain points. Prioritize: Use a method like Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) to prioritize items based on customer value and effort required. Small Batches: Break down the work into smaller, manageable pieces. This allows for quicker iterations and validations. WIP Limits: Use Work-In-Progress limits to focus on completing tasks. This ensures that you validate as you go, rather than building up a backlog of unvalidated work. Feedback Loops: Implement short feedback loops with stakeholders and customers. Use metrics and KPIs to measure the impact of what you've delivered. Inspect and Adapt: Regularly review the process and the product.

Discovery should always be an ongoing process of continuous improvement, involving the whole team. A systematic approach ensures a responsive and efficient product development cycle, always aligned with customer needs and market dynamics.

I usually takes interviews that the best way to understand the problem along with potential solutions. A PM is an advocate of users and those users would also tell you the problem along with prospect solutions. You need to then find the data to back up your decision so that it add values to the org You are ready to prioritise on Kanban and do testimonials along with developments

1. Prioritize customer needs and maintain a visual Kanban board. 2. Limit WIP, collect feedback, and iterate continuously. 3. Empower teams, measure lead/cycle time, and celebrate successes.

Product discovery is indeed a critical aspect of effective product management, and it aligns well with Janardhana's extensive experience in the field. In his role as a product leader at Bosch, he has demonstrated a strong ability to innovate and create diagnostic tools that serve a global market. Understanding and implementing product discovery principles can further enhance his ability to identify and address customer needs and opportunities

You need to have data to backup all your task that you are gonna list on kanban You took the interview of customer so a PM understands the pain point of the customer along with the solution that you thought. Make a kanban(I usually prefer 4 stage 1. Ideation 2. Work in progress 3. Done 4. Backlog You can mark those task with different Color to make it more important one or can put on top as per the priority. Let your team know the vision you have in your mind along with the top priority first rather doing multiple things at the same time.

I always advocate starting with a process and board that are fairly simple, and adapting as needed. Better to start with a few columns that make sense for the team and add more as needed, than to spend time up front trying to perfect the entire process and over-complicating it. When in doubt, keep it simple!

Visualizing the discovery workflow in Kanban is a crucial step in the product management process, and it can significantly benefit Janardhana's approach to product leadership. Given his innovative work at Bosch and his commitment to mentoring other product managers, incorporating effective visualization techniques into the discovery process can further elevate his impact. Creating a Kanban board with stages from ideation to validation, as you described, is a practical approach. Janardhana's experience in managing complex projects and smart solutions in multiple cities underscores the importance of clear communication and tracking progress.

Understand Your Team’s Capacity: Review your team's historical data such as the number of tasks completed per day/week and the velocity to get a sense of your team's capacity. Set Initial WIP Limits: Start with initial limits based on your team's capacity. It might not be perfect at first, but it's a starting point. Visualize work in a Kanban board: Represent work items visibly in columns on a Kanban board, with each column representing a different stage in the workflow. Enforce WIP limits: The team as a whole should respect the WIP limits. If a limit is reached, team members must focus on completing current tasks before they can start new ones.

Limiting WIP has a lot in common with prioritization of the tasks. Proper balance of team capacities with most painful needs of the customer helps to avoid multitasking and/or overload of the team effort. It does not mean that less important issues shall not be taken into account but it happens often that, after solving main problems, many other issues become obsolete.

You need to test all your hypothesis A big tech team is going to work on a task but before letting them start you need to know which one is important and would have great ROI You can prefer RICE model to prioritise the task There might be different way to validate too

Risk Rating, the Prioritization Matrix, and other decision-making frameworks. In general, hypotheses should be sorted based on their potential impact on the product or project if they were true and the level of uncertainty or risk involved. Here's a typical step-by-step approach: Identify and List Hypotheses: With your team, brainstorm and list all assumptions or hypotheses that could influence your product or project's success. These assumptions could be related to user needs, product functionality, market conditions, and so on. Rank Hypotheses: Based on the potential impact and uncertainty, rank these hypotheses. You can use methods like Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF), Risk Rating, or a simple high-medium-low classification.

There are so many prioritization methods and all of them work for different people, different products, and different teams. The key is to understand what will work best for the current situation. For example, MoSCoW is fast but is subject to the whims of whoever is doing it. RICE is more thoughtful but takes more effort and can suffer from inaccurate numbers. Validation methods are the same way: understanding the team's capabilities and who will be doing the testing and validation will help determine the best method to use.

Inspection and adaptation in Kanban are integral parts of the agile and lean approach to project management, which aims for continuous improvements in work processes.

Examining and adjusting results in Kanban can be challenging, requiring careful interpretation of the data. Kanban data may occasionally yield skewed results, making it advisable to consider the Kanban board as a whole and establish clear boundaries for each swimlane. In my experience, creating a feature map based on a Kanban board offers more detailed and nuanced insights.