Lean waste walks are an important tool that product managers should regularly use to optimize key processes and identify opportunities for improvement. A lean waste walk involves meticulously walking through a business process end-to-end, observing and gathering data to find areas of waste and inefficiency. This stems from lean manufacturing principles centered around eliminating waste.
For product managers, waste walks help engage cross-functional partners to deeply understand and improve how products are designed, built, and delivered to customers. When conducted quarterly, they can lead to impactful improvements that compound over time. In today’s competitive landscape, product teams must embrace a continuous improvement mindset, and lean waste walks are an effective way to make this mindset a reality.
Background on Lean Principles
Lean principles originated in the Toyota Production System as a set of practices to improve manufacturing efficiency. Pioneered in Japan beginning in the 1950s, lean aimed to eliminate process waste, inconsistencies, and non-value-adding activities. Key facets included optimizing workflow, only building necessary inventory, balancing workloads, preventative maintenance, and empowering workers. These principles led Toyota to become hugely successful and surpass American automakers by the 1980s. Beyond just manufacturing, lean was applied more broadly to other industries to reduce costs and defects while improving quality and speed. Principles like iterative development, cross-functional teams, simplifying processes, and amplifying learning are now commonplace in software and product development.
There are seven established types of waste targeted in lean: transport, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, overprocessing, and defects. For example, product development teams aim to eliminate waste through minimum viable products instead of overproduction, iterative development to avoid defects, and cross-functional collaboration to prevent knowledge siloes. While originated in manufacturing, lean has become a mindset that fuels constant improvement across industries. For product managers, regularly conducting lean waste walks inherits this mindset and sustains focus on enhancing how products deliver value to customers and users.
Benefits of Waste Walks for Product Managers
Conducting periodic waste walks provides several key benefits for product managers:
- Develops a deeper understanding of business processes – Following a process end-to-end grants product managers fuller visibility into how work gets done across departments. This understanding informs better decision-making.
- Identifies improvement opportunities – Waste walks shine a light on areas of rework, bottlenecks, duplication, and other inefficiencies. Documenting quantifiable metrics and pain points enables targeted problem-solving.
- Engages cross-functional partners – Waste walks prompt collaboration across teams like engineering, design, customer support, and sales. This builds alignment and shared ownership of processes.
- Provides data to prioritize roadmap – By quantifying waste, product managers gain data to prioritize roadmap initiatives that optimize processes. This data is powerful when shared with executives as well.
- Focuses team on continuous improvement – The regular habit of waste walks reinforces a culture of incrementally getting better versus complacency. Compounding small improvements drives results.
- Highlights visibility into waste – Presenting observations and metrics from waste walks gives product managers an influential voice in championing process improvements across the organization.
How to Conduct a Lean Waste Walk
The steps to conduct an effective lean waste walk include:
- Define scope – Determine which process to focus on (e.g. customer onboarding, release process, feature development, etc). Get leadership support and recruit cross-functional partners from teams like engineering, design, and customer success.
- Map current state – Document the workflow steps in the process before observing it. This establishes a baseline.
- Schedule the walk – Allot 1-2 hours to walk through the process in real-time while it is happening. Be at relevant locations when the process is underway.
- Gather data – Move through the process and visually observe. Note areas of delay or redundancy. Take photos and time how long each step takes. Document findings thoroughly.
- Interview people – At each step, discuss with those involved to get their perspectives on pain points and bottlenecks. Ask about improvements they would suggest.
- Identify waste sources – Analyze findings and determine what types of waste are occurring according to the 7 defined wastes. Quantify them.
- Hold a debrief session – Meet with team members involved to review findings and brainstorm solutions.
- Prioritize and implement changes – Decide which improvements to tackle first based on potential impact. Utilize PDCA (plan-do-check-act) cycle to test and iterate changes.
- Standardize successful changes – Update documentation and training to scale improvements across the organization.
- Repeat regularly – Conduct waste walks every quarter focusing on different processes to sustain continuous improvement.
Applying Waste Walks as a Product Manager
To fully integrate lean waste walks, product managers should:
- Schedule walks quarterly – Plan them at the start of each quarter and select different processes to evaluate.
- Recruit cross-functional partners – Get representatives from key teams like engineering, design, and customer success to join.
- Focus early walks on key processes – Good areas for initial focus include customer onboarding, feature development processes, and customer support issues.
- Use findings to inform roadmap – Let waste walk data guide roadmap prioritization discussions on resourcing and process optimization initiatives.
- Report insights to executives – Share observations, metrics, and improvement opportunities with company leaders to get buy-in.
- Communicate results company-wide – Promote successful changes implemented and recognized company-wide to motivate continuous improvement culture.
- Assess cultural adoption – After a year of consistent waste walks, reflect on how behaviors and mindsets have shifted towards continuous improvement.
- Expand scope – Once addressing internal processes, conduct waste walks to understand customer and user workflows to identify improvement areas.
Conclusion
Lean waste walks should become a regular habit for product managers seeking to enhance how their products deliver value. While originating from lean manufacturing, waste walks are broadly applicable for identifying and eliminating inefficiencies in all processes. The quantifiable data and visibility they provide into improvement opportunities make waste walks an impactful tool. When conducted quarterly and focused on different areas, they compound small changes into substantial results. Product managers must champion cultures of continuous improvement to thrive in competitive markets. Lean waste walks empower product teams to constantly optimize their products and business processes. Just as waste walks are a regular practice at Toyota, they should become routine for product managers striving for excellence. By embracing waste walks, product managers can evolve processes from wasteful to world-class.