Streamline Your Document Signing Process with Pipeline Bid Management for Product Management

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hi everyone welcome to lean for product managers my name is tim mullen and i'm a senior product manager at amazon and i'm going to be talking about lean today and how that can be implemented by product managers i learned lean at toyota where i worked for six years i was a toyota production system instructor and i led projects to design and deploy jit supply chain systems and solutions for auto part our focus today will be mostly on the philosophy of lean though we will talk about some technical lean tools we only have about 30 or so minutes so we can't go too deep into all everything about lean but what i want to leave you with is some key takeaways so that you'll be able to have a good understanding of what of what lean is all about and some practical ways to implement it so as product managers we build the vision and strategy of products to meet customer needs and project manage until release and so our focus is on what we should build and we work with tech teams to deliver so emphasis on the word should so should deals a lot with philosophy what you think about business what you think about the way things should operate and so as product managers we want to make sure that we're building the right things for our customers so what is your business philosophy is business an adversarial venture where each person tries to take the most value out of the other person i hope not are we here to create winners and losers i don't as for me that's not my intention when i when i engage in business uh one one thing that inspired me uh which i read it was from henry ford and it was almost about a hundred years ago when he wrote it and henry ford is credited by toyota as being the inventor of lean and he wrote it has been thought that business exists for profit that is wrong business exists for service so how do businesses serve well businesses serve by making products that enrich the lives of others while reducing prices lead times and increasing quality businesses serve by offering good working conditions and stable employment and they serve by giving back by supporting the community and the environment so what is lean lean is a systematic management philosophy that enables organizations to increase the amount of value they provide to customers leading to greater customer and employee satisfaction and business growth so the origins of lean come from the writings of henry ford i highly encourage you to read his autobiographical book one of them being my life and work and toyota managers read his books and they codified his principles into the toyota production system and it was later read and uh studied by professors at mit and university of michigan and other people in academia and they popularized it under the name of lean and lean has been adopted in various forms by most industries so the framework of lean is really the way toyota has codified it is under this framework here called the house of tps and it has several layers to it and all of these layers and components work together in concert to produce the the the top point of this house which is the outcome layer so you can see on the bottom we have a philosophical layer which is the things that lean values in the system this is where we're coming from this is why we're doing what we're doing respect for humanity customer first continuous improvement again by first and stability and i'll go into a lot of this later to kind of flesh out what these mean the next is the methods and tools layer how do we implement our philosophies such that we can have the outcome layer which is the peak here where we're able to produce the highest quality lowest cost and shortest lead time products so the methods and tools these are these are what get a lot of the the play and the media of just in time processes kaizens and then other kinds of principles that we don't have time to go into today but these are all the technical tools that people like to talk about but most people don't really talk about the philosophies or even what are the what is it what are the ideal outcomes that we're shooting for when we when we implement so a key simple takeaway that i want people to to recognize uh or to walk away from with this presentation is in lean if you get the philosophies right if you're really dedicated to the philosophy then the tools methods and outcomes will naturally manifest over time they will show up okay and then however if you focus on the tools methods and outcomes first and get the philosophies wrong then your ship will crash on the rocks and i'll go into more of this later so let's talk about respect for humanity so respect for humanity involves teamwork trust partnership understanding and collaboration so what are some practical applications for product managers because that sounds pretty basic right respect for humanity sure i respect people well how about this when you build your products you solicit input feedback and try to get buy-in for people at all levels and all backgrounds not just the decision makers that shows respect for humanity when you include everybody how about this uh do you actively seek to eliminate policies that you wrote trust how about this or overcharging a captive audience have you ever paid seven dollars for a bottle of water at a baseball game or in a theme park you're being taken advantage of when that happens that is not respect for humanity or if there's subscription cancellation friction within your products or services that does not make it easy or build trust with your customers when it comes to them you know operating that transaction with you hidden fees or selling sensitive data without them knowing about this this does not show respect for your customers how about building products in a way that does not increase burden for other teams or tech debt you know sometimes we can hide hidden gotchas and products that we build and not really build that long-term trust when we work with when we engage with other teams and also uh how about building products that do not harm the environment so you know these are all different ways that we show respect for humanity when we're building our products and solutions next is customer first the business exists exists to serve customers by creating products that are valuable and enrich their lives seeking out their experiences and incorporating their feedback into products so what are one of the common tools in lean is the voice of the customer actively studying and surveying your customers and listening to their experiences to try to improve the products so practical applications for product management managers who is my customer externally obviously is the person paying for the product but what about your internal customer your internal customer is anyone who depends on you and in amazon we have a philosophy or a leadership principle principle called customer obsession so it says leaders start with the customer and work backwards and we have a technical tool called the prfaq document so have you ever considered yourself to be customer obsessed about your internal customer while giving them everything that they need to be successful and then the next philosophy is continuous improvement businesses should seek continuous improvement out of respect for humanity and to serve their customers better so you can see that these philosophies are working in concert together improvements should be executed continuously but aligned with your long-term ideal state having vision for the future lexus has a slogan called that says the relentless pursuit of perfection basically toyota as a company is being very overt about this value when they when they have this slogan they're telling you that they are seeking as a philosophy to continuously pursue improvement and perfection in their products and at toyota they have a saying that says it's the process that's never best only better that's a mindset and a way of thinking in your business the next is genba first and genba is a japanese word that means the place of work and so within within a manufacturing environment or any environment where you're creating something um toyota would say that the greatest value is being performed at the job site by the person who's doing the work and not by people who are thinking and strategizing in ivory tower or in the corporate headquarters what you want when you're when you're creating your your lean system is to say what they're saying here is that they value the place of work more than anything else so practical applications requirements gathering should start with a deep understanding of the current state of the process and the problems and we'll go into a little bit later about ways to do that you show respect for humanity when you connect with the users of your products in person and what there's a principle within toyota they call genji gambutsu where go look go see and they they prioritize that they want you to go and visit the place where you're going to help provide solutions to you want to see the person doing their work if possible you want to do the work yourself so you can experience what they're going through and then in my toyota days my korean friends used to call this kimchi gimbutsu where they would say go look and go eat which means when you go and you you do your genji gembutsu and you meet with your customer you go take them out to lunch and you have candid conversations with them and you build relationships so that you can more fully understand their condition and build better products that meet their needs so we talked about the first layer which is the philosophical uh inputs and drivers of why we do lean the next philosophical layer is stability and it's got this long bar that goes across the whole bottom and the reason is because stability is the great enabler for um for lean without stability you cannot do anything and so when the environment is unstable you see conditions like constant escalation low morale and high attrition rampant waste poor quality long lead times high cost poor customer experience ineffective process improvement and a lot of times when companies are trying to implement lean and they're focusing on the tools and methods and outcomes first they they they do so without a stability strategy and what i'll see a lot is they'll try to implement jit because if i do jit then i will reduce my inventory levels and my costs will go down and everything will be better but what ends up happening is that they they get so lean that they actually hurt themselves it's because they didn't think about stability and at toyota and any effective lean leader what they will actually do is they will add waste into their process to improve stability over going lean and implementing jit so if if we look if we recall in the previous slide i'll go back up here stability is a philosophical layer and then the methods and tools like just in time reside far above that you must have stability first before you can do anything else so a way to think about this is this a classic uh example here which is uh you have a boat that's on water and it's being the boat is being guided by a captain and you are that captain you as the product manager and the boat is the business and what you're what you're riding on on the water is actually your capacity supply level this could be personnel this could be compute capacity this could be inventory on the shelf um what whatever you have in order to meet your customer demand is basically what that capacity is it could be lead time as well so you have capacity and then there's rocks underneath all of that water and thank god you have water because uh you're able to glide across that water and sustain your business but your water level is kind of high you have you have a little bit of excess here so the question is how low can you go before you crash into the rock and so you got to first understand what are my rock and some of the rocks can be the highest one here is high demand variants if i have a demand variance for my customer that i don't understand i cannot predict then this is a this is a big problem for me and if i if i reduce my capacity to meet my customer needs below the demand variance then i could run into that rock or my maybe my supplier doesn't deliver to me on time every time or with high quality and so i have variable lead times or maybe i don't standardize my work and so every time somebody does a project or does a repeatable process it's not uh it's not standardized and we have low quality or maybe i have high attrition or turnover so in lean what what's attractive in industry is well i want to reduce my water level my capacity my supply levels so i'm running lean and i have less capital tied up or less money tied up in in supporting all of this excess weight well great but if you do not address the rocks first if you do not have a strategy for stability to to address those problems you can reduce your water level so much that you can crash your boat and crash your business and so uh what we want to do and lean what we always want to do we want to stabilize process identify the rocks remove them and slowly lower the water level with caution and in my experience at toyota there's no manager that ever recklessly tried to reduce inventory or reduce capacity in a way that was reckless they always had a stability strategy that they did not impact the business so these mechanisms the stability philosophy once you have that you're now able to engage in effective standardized work effective kaizen hijunka which is level loading you're able to do just in time in judoka which will ultimately allow you to get to the highest quality lowest cost and shortest lead time so what are some lean methods and tools well how do we get stability execute philosophies and achieve outcomes so these are the methods and tools that are going to put all of our philosophies into action hijunka i mentioned this before level lowing production to to reduce noise of demand variation the goal of a lean environment is to have every day look exactly the same as the previous day if you're doing lots of overtime if you're doing lots of escalations that means that you have an unplanned outcome in your environment and you do not want that you want stability in your environment ajunka is a mechanism to achieve stability it actually adds waste into the process but it's in a toyota would say this is a good waste to add to this process it processes if if it produces stability overall this is not a commonly understood principle and this is a key enabler to do anything with just-in-time inventory management standardized work so when we standardize processes we are able to make them repeatable and predictable so we use standard operating procedures we create process flows to understand what's happening we use 5s which is a maintenance activity to maintain the work environment to keep it clean and orderly kaizen we conduct kaizen processes continuously all the time we're always looking for ways to improve and we identify waste and things that can be improved by using this acronym downtime which is it identifies eight waste uh it's made up of defect defects over production weighting non-utilization of talent excess transportation inventory motion extra processing and then root cause analysis five wise whenever you have a defect that occurs ask why five times or more times to understand why is this happening to solve that problem and prevent it from reoccurring and then value stream mapping and i'll go into this in a minute which gives you a great mechanism to identify to map your process and identify all the pockets where waste exists and then just in time which deals with customer driven demand driving your supply chain end-to-end so this involves concepts like kanban pull systems tack time one piece flow milk runs small a lot high frequency and there's so much in here in each one of these that you could go into and dive deep into and extrapolate which you don't have time here to do today but um i just want to give you some flavor for the context of these and how they fit into the overall architecture of the of the house of tps and then jadoka which is building quality inspection into the process making sure that no uh no defect passes along to the next process in the line um there's ways to to enable that through and encore poka yoki and also jadoka is concerned about worker safety so these methods and tools reinforce each other and they enable us to implement our philosophies but i will note that some tools do not readily translate to non-manufacturing business situations like milk runs which is a logistics function though there could be cases where if you got creative you can implement a milk run in an office environment um i think folks at toyota would be the first to tell you that yeah you're not always able to implement these in every situation but if you get creative about it and you think you think about it enough you'll find where these principles apply so i want to get into the kaizen process and i took this screenshot from actually something i saw on linkedin from um jeffrey leicher and uh his book of the toyota kata it talks about how we think about um continuous improvement and and what are we doing with kaizen and so the first step is you want to identify your ideal long-term state so you can see in in the circle one uh up at the top right there of the diagram you'll see um yeah here's my mouse here you'll see this is ultimately where do i want to go that's the mountain i want to climb but i have this road from between me and and where i want to be and there's all kinds of pitfalls road blockages all kinds of things in the way so how do i get from where i'm at today to my ultimate destination well you must deeply understand where you are today and you must understand those roadblocks that exist in the way and you know this is part and parcel of the process of creating a road map and so we'll we'll talk later about deeply understanding this through a value stream map process we create a smart goal a to create a target condition of where can i go in the short term right now to make incremental improvement along the way and you'll see that on the right here with the target condition and then we do plan do check adjust which is this process where we create the plan to meet the smart goal how am i going to get there we do the plan and then we check our performance to see okay how is this going and we as we're continuously checking that performance we do adjustments and then we just repeat this process over and over and over again until we climb that mountain and get to where we ultimately want to be recognizing that we can never truly get to the state of perfection there's no no best only better but we're always continuously driving to something better so uh now now i'm going to start talking about value stream mapping and within the context of lean we have this concept of of flow and you've probably heard that it's like a buzzword within lean and what's what this represents is a good way to think about this is if you go to a theme park so in a theme park environment um like if i'm if i'm taking my family to the theme park i gotta drive to the theme park with them and then we get out of the car and then we we walk and we go and we buy our tickets we get in line to buy our tickets and then we get out of that line then we go through a line of security we get at that line we go into the line to get into the park then once we get into the park we think about where we want to go and then we walk maybe a quarter mile to half a mile to the next ride where we can get on to it and then we we get in line at that ride and it takes us 30 45 minutes to get maybe an hour to get to that line and then we get on the ride and the ride we go for one to three minutes and it's a great it's fantastic we love it we get off and we do it all over again we walk another quarter mile half mile to the next ride we get in a line we wait for an hour and then we go on that ride and we can write for another couple minutes so what i'm paying for as a customer is that period of time when i'm on the ride that's what i'm most excited about maybe maybe it's nice to see the gardening around the park and everything and just to be there in the environment but i'm definitely not paying to be in line i don't want to be in line it's it's a waste of my day it's the waste of everybody else's day it's a hassle um so that's an a flow interrupter ideally what i want is to be on a ride back to back to back to back throughout the whole day that that would be awesome if i didn't have to wait in any lines all day long that would be my perfect a perfect theme park experience um but obviously that's just not how theme parks operate but that would be a flow state where i'm going back to back to back to back on every single ride anything interrupting that flow is a waste so in a value stream map this is something that helps you to identify um those kinds of situations in a business context and you can do a value stream map for any kind of business process whether it's operating a manufacturing facility a distribution center or in this case um executing a marketing campaign for your business so the way it works is you start up in the top right and this is your customer and your customers is initiating some kind of request and they say i want to do this campaign great they submit some a campaign request to the system in this fictitious business business environment and then this procurement department says okay great i'm going to initiate a request for quotes rfqs to several vendors that i know about great and these are studio vendors and they're going to help create this marketing campaign but they're going to submit bids for for that job and so these vendors they're going to they're going to send their responses back and and they're going to send them to this procurement administrator maybe a secretary person and that person is going to receive maybe letters in the mail or emails or whatever and their job what they're supposed to do is receive that information scan it digitize it and then pass it along to the procurement intern who's going who's going to do a check now this procurement administrator who does this process she's a chair this person is a shared resource and they do multiple functions so they're this is not their sole function and because of that when the vendor sends the information this information sits in their inbox for in this case it looks like up to 12 and a half days it'll just sit in their inbox waiting for them to take action okay great so it sits there for a while and then when they finally take action it takes them about a half an hour to do the actual work and then they kick it over to the next person and say all right now it's in your queue great so it's for the procurement intern he's also a shared resource he's you know he's he's doing his function and uh he'll get to it when he gets to it and apparently it takes him four days to get to each one of these things and when he does it it takes him an hour to actually check each rfq and process it and then they're going to do a digital upload to the system so they're going to upload this file into the system and then and because this person is an intern they actually have 20 defects when they do their job they're still learning and so there's there's a redo effort here that that causes churn in this environment okay so once he's once he's done he kicks it over and um and then it goes to the procurement analyst and this person's got more experience and they're going to look at this work and uh they've got other things going on it sits in their queue for seven days in their inbox and uh and then they all right they say all right i'm gonna start doing my work they download these rfqs they analyze the rfqs it takes them an hour for each rfq that they look at and then they uh if if they have an exception where they say wow this rfp came back and it's worth a million you know they want up more than a million dollars they'll send it over to finance and then finance will will say yes i grant this exception or i don't it takes finance a couple hours to do it sits in their queue for a couple days and then ultimately it'll both of these if there's not an exception it'll it'll go to the procurement supervisor and then they'll they'll initiate a batch process where they where they do all of their work and it takes them four hours every time they they compile all these rfqs and to make a decision and then they send this package back to the marketing department so wow there's a lot going on that is not uncommon in any work environment you'll see this happen everywhere shared resources not working in concert together uh actually leads to an outcome where if you count up all the days and and the individual lead times here end to end the process takes it'll take each each rfq 26 days to go through the pipeline okay and the actual time where people are are physically working on this product adding value to it is six and a half days of time and even that's questionable like why does it take the procurement supervisor four hours to do their function right so and then so when you think about the ratio of the flow ratio of the value add versus the weighting you have a 3.1 amount of time where you're adding value in this process and everything else the 97 is really just waiting around for somebody to get around to it so if you're wondering why the marketing if the market department is wondering why can't we you know respond to our customer demand faster why can't we launch campaigns faster this is why so you know some things to think about when we when we start thinking about the current state of the process we're going to map downtime to each of these buckets here and understand where where is their waste and defects we have a low value added ratio high cycle time on creating the proposal you know one of the things one of the tools of lean is tack time and the line balance how fast should each of these processes be taking that's a calculation you can run in lean to know that your line is balanced so that everybody's is working in concert with each other another thing you can do is set up a workflow cycle where you say uh we're going to on mondays we're going to all of us are going to sit in a room and we're going to knock this process out and so what it would do is it would take the lead time down from 26 days to 7 days great that's a that's a major transformation so another thing is this is a push system not a pull system so the the you know each person is just pushing the next phase of the information down to the next person whether they're ready for it or not and so what happens in that kind of environment is defects start to hide and you have batch processes piling up and lead time increases and it's just not a continuous flow of activity and then another thing to consider is how long does it take the vendor to come up with their rfq that's something to think about maybe you can partner with your vendors to help them improve their process and get quicker at that and then why are there defects at all in in a lean state what we're shooting for is zero defects so another thing to for the procurement analyst to work with the procurement intern on is what are some common repeatable defects where we can come back and and um you know reduce those with with greater training so if you're a product manager and you're engaging with some kind of system solution on top of this value stream be mindful of what's going on end to end it if you're if your job is to maybe try to automate the create proposal process great but be mindful that you know there are there are several other process going on here end to end that are also impacting this process uh for better or for worse and so before you myopically focus on improving this one process keep in mind that there's an entire system that needs to be analyzed and and understood to know where the full value is end to end so in summary a lean product will seek to deliver customer value through lowest cost highest quality and shortest lead time all while upholding the foundational philosophies pms can use this framework to deeply understand their customers problems create vision for how their products should serve and project manage to deliver the right outcomes and this is a quote that inspired me from henry ford and i think it underpins why we do lean and he said 1922 old-time business went on the doctrine that prices should always be kept up to the highest point at which people will buy really modern business in 1922 has to take the opposite view i do not believe that we should make such an awful profit on our cars a reasonable profit is right but not too much so it has been my policy to force the price of the car down as fast as production would permit and give the benefits to users and laborers with resultingly with resulting surprisingly enormous benefits to ourselves so that comes from his book my life and work this is a quote that has inspired me and i hope it inspires you too i think that if we think of business as an opportunity to serve other people we can really produce transformative results for the business our customers and society and i wish you best of luck on your lean journey thank you [Music] you