Getting your product management organised using Kanban tools

Key points:

• Kanban comes from Japan
• It’s a powerful tool to help you focus on what’s important
• It really does work outside of cars and software

No doubt most of you will have used a Kanban in your work life. If you are a product professional or involved in the development of software then you will recognise it as the industry standard for how tasks are managed. It works great for this as well as operational areas. It also works beyond these use cases.

A good product manager will likely be familiar with Kanban even if they don’t know it by that name. They are willing and able to learn new techniques to help organise their activity. They are open to new ways of working that will improve collaboration and results.

This post provides an overview in case you are not familiar. It also highlights some uses for Kanban outside of the typical cases in most businesses today.

What is Kanban all about

Kanban is actually the Japanese term for signboard or billboard.

It is a system that was originally developed for use in the manufacturing of automobiles within the Toyota company. Credited to Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer.

Kanban uses cards that are physically moved through a set of processes in a workflow. Cards include valuable information such as the product, parts or inventory that needs to progress.

Kanban focuses people on what is known as Work in Progress (aka WIP) and throughput rather than capacity.

Why is it so powerful

The reason this is so powerful is that throughput is a higher order metric than capacity. What I mean by this is that your capacity for work in a system doesn’t really matter if you aren’t delivering product. Or to put it another way, being able to fit the most amount of food in your mouth at once doesn’t mean you will be able to win a speed eating contest…

You may have some of the most efficient steps in a process, but if one of them has a severe bottleneck, you are toast.

I will talk more about this in more detail in a future post.

A great exercise that you can do with your team to show them the benefits of this system is the “Coin Game”. Note: I refuse to call it the “Penny Game”given we are not in the USA…

The Coin Game shows teams that smaller batches and refinement of execution are powerful. It also shows them that early value can be achieved with different approaches.

How is it typically used

You are likely familiar with the use of Kanban for software product delivery. They are used for planning out program increments and sprints. The product team typically prioritises the cards and works with the engineering team to evaluate their complexity and effort. The ICE framework is one such method which stands for Impact, Confidence and Ease. These sorts of scoring models can help you to make sure you do the thing that will balance the least effort with the greatest result first.

How else could I use Kanban

I have used Kanban for personal organisation. Combining it with some techniques like GTD for managing my own activities. In this case you may want to experiment with using categorisation of frequency of review on an area rather than due dates. Then split the board into those categories and move the activities accordingly. This is a way of using the form rather than the original function of the full Kanban system.

I’ve also used it to manage self directed learning and memorisation. Combining Kanban with techniques such as the Leitner system. Here you might categorise a concept as requiring daily, weekly or monthly review. When you get it right you may push it to a less frequent review. When you get it wrong you may step up the review frequency. Here you are using the board categories to represent review frequency. Again this is a way of using the form over the original function.

I’ve also used Kanban for managing the activity of a product team more broadly. I did this across a globally distributed team. It brought us great insight as to how the team works and visibility on what the team was up to. I was able to then work with them to upskill and cross skill where throughput wasn’t working well. I was also able to intervene when lower priority items were given preference incorrectly.

Try it out for yourself. There are many digital versions you can use. You can also go old school and use post it notes on a board. You will not regret it.

If you need help with this or any other element of digital or product in your business, get in touch with us below.

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