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Syllabus |
LAPM is a one-semester course, taught in the form of 12-13 three-hour weekly classes, of which typically 2-3 are guest lectures. Nine of the ten remaining classes are detailed below. The final class is for final project presentations.
Note: this is the 2019 syllabus. It has been revised substantially for 2020, and this page is now out-of-date. You can find the 2020 syllabus here.
In our first class, we’ll discuss the various characteristics and types of products, paying particular attention to the product lifecycle. We’ll introduce the idea of a business model, and discuss the various risks that products might face in different parts of the product lifecycle. We’ll review a brief history of project and product management, and discuss the differences between the two.
- The History of Lean Software Development by Mary and Tom Poppendieck.
- The New Methodology by Martin Fowler
There will be a quiz to complete on this unit's material.
This class will introduce the idea of a scientific approach to product development. We’ll focus on how to make sure we build products customers love, starting with how to frame hypotheses and perform user research.
- Won’t be Fooled Again by Jeff Patton
- Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf with Josh Seiden
- Practical Empathy by Indi Young
- Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra
- Agile User Experience Design by Lindsay Ratcliffe and Marc McNeill
- Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design by Alex Osterwalder et al
- 18F Method Cards for Discovery
For this assignment, you'll need to come up with an idea for a business. This could be for a project that you're currently working on, or you can make up a business idea of your own.
For this assignment, complete the following exercises by filling out this template.
- Write a brief problem statement for your product (<100 words).
- Create a proto-persona for your product.
- Complete an empathy map for your proto-persona (the linked canvas has more detail than the template).
- Complete a value proposition canvas for your persona (the linked canvas has more detail than the template).
- Complete a business model canvas for your product (the linked canvas has more detail than the template).
- Fill out a Business Assumptions Worksheet for your product.
In this class we’ll present the concepts at the heart of the agile approach to software development, using Scrum and Kanban as our guides. We’ll learn about iterative and incremental development, the various activities that need to be performed in the iterative model, and the key roles found in agile teams.
- What is Extreme Programming by Ron Jeffries.
- Scrum Overview for Agile Software Development by Mike Cohn
Elisabeth Hendrickson's WordCount simulation
Write a 800 word essay reflecting on your experience with the WordCount exercise in class, and how agile development concepts were able to improve your team's ability to release features and satisfy customers.
Some guide questions that can help frame your response (no need to respond to all):
- What was your role in the exercise?
- How did your role change through the three rounds/iterations?
- Was your team able to successfully adapt using Agile methods?
- How could the team have performed better?
- Did you see parallels in the exercise to real situations in the workplace?
- What concepts or examples from the readings or group presentations did you see or wish you had seen your team apply in the exercise?
Optional supplementary reading for assignment:
This class will present hypothesis-driven development, the cutting-edge paradigm for evolving validated products. We’ll dive into how to frame hypotheses, design experiments, and use A/B testing to gather data to prove or disprove our ideas.
- Platform Rant by Steve Yegge
- Early Amazon Shopping Cart by Greg Linden
- A/B Testing and Continuous Delivery by Nellwyn Thomas
- How to Write a Good PRD by Marty Cagan
- Impact Mapping by Gojko Adzic
- Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf with Josh Seiden
- Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, and Barry O'Reilly
Design an experiment to validate one of the key product hypotheses from your Week 2 assignment, using the template from today's class. Describe your experiment, including:
- What do you expect the results to be?
- What result will confirm your hypothesis?
- What result will disprove your hypothesis?
- How soon can we get the result?
Despite rumours to the contrary, there are planning activities in the agile model. In this class we’ll discuss how to plan releases, and present story mapping and impact mapping as effective tools for design, ideation and planning.
- Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell by Henrik Kniberg
- User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton by Jeff Patton
- Dear Customer: The Truth about IT Projects by Allan Kelly
- Estimation is Evil by Ron Jeffries
- Waltzing with Bears by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
- User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton
Create a user story map for one of the personas you created in your Unit 2 assignment. If you were excused from that assignment, feel free to use a project you're working on this semester and create a persona to use in this assignment.
Identify three activities the chosen persona might want to carry out with your software, and map out the activities, backbone, and tasks like we discussed this week in class. Expect to spend about an hour on this, not including reading the resources. You may use a tool of your choice to turn this in, such as turning in a PDF document or a URL to an online tool such as stickies.io or Trello (If using Trello, please add the course TA to your board.)
Please leverage the following resources (in addition to the readings for this week) in creating your user story map:
- Jeff Patton's quick reference---start with Page 2. In this activity, I'm expecting you to carry out the first 3 steps listed on page 2: Frame, Map the big picture, Explore. I'm not expecting you to slice out releases or prepare a development strategy.
- Chapter 1 of Jeff Patton's book has an example of a story mapping exercise.
- Here's another article that you might find useful.
This class presents the idea of using economic frameworks for portfolio and project management. We’ll begin with an overview of the three horizons model, and discuss the economic models that are suitable in each horizon. We’ll then discuss and experiment with economic tools that can be applied in each horizon, including the Value of Information, Monte Carlo and Cost of Delay.
- Black Swan Farming using Cost of Delay by Joshua J Arnold and Özlem Yüce
- How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard
- The Principles of Product Development Flow by Don Reinertsen
- Waltzing with Bears by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
- Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, and Barry O'Reilly
- Decision Tree Primer by Craig Kirkwood.
Decision tree problem set
This class will discuss how to build effective product development teams. We’ll discuss the lifecycle of teams, recruiting, effective line management including how to motivate and develop your people, and practice conflict resolution techniques. We'll also cover what is expected of a product manager, including the skills, responsibilities and key activities product managers must perform.
- NUMMI 2015 by This American Life
- How to Change a Culture: Lessons from NUMMI by John Shook
- The Power of an Agile Mindset by Linda Rising
- The Talent Myth by Malcolm Gladwell
- Mindset by Carol Dweck
- Drive by Daniel Pink
- Fourteen Points for Management by W. Edwards Deming
- One on Ones template by Manager Tools
- Inspired by Marty Cagan
- Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming
- Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, and Barry O'Reilly
- Product Managers Are Working on the Wrong Things by Tom Grant
Choose one of Deming's 14 points for management, and write a 800 word essay on its implications for product management.
Scrum and Kanban are frameworks designed to help manage work and perform process improvement at the team level. In this class we will explore Scrum, Kanban, and what XP has to say about work management. We'll discuss the key practices involved in applying these frameworks, the differences between them, and which situations to use them in.
- The Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland
- Kanban and Scrum: Making the Most of Both by Henrik Kniberg and Mattias Skarin
- Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (2nd Edition) by Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres
- Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business by David J Anderson
There will be a quiz on this unit's material.
At heart, Lean is about working to create resilient, adaptive organizations. Crucially, the work of getting better is never done. In this class we’ll try out techniques for continuous improvement from the Lean management philosophy including retrospectives and the improvement kata, and discuss how to apply them in the context of product development.
- HP LaserJet Firmware Case Study -- pp112-127 from Chapter 6 (use printed page numbers!)
- Optional: Gary Gruver's 30m talk about the transformation.
- What strategies could the HP LaserJet team have employed to get firmware off the critical path? Why did they choose the approach they did?
- Imagine you were a product manager at HP working on products that used the LaserJet firmware during this rearchitecture. How would you have been impacted? What would you have to do differently? What would be keeping you awake at night?
- A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development by Gruver et al
- Leading the Transformation by Gruver et al
- Toyota Kata by Mike Rother
- Toyota Kata Handbook by Mike Rother
There will be a quiz on the material for this unit.