Overview
The Product Kata by Melissa Perri of HBS expands on the Kanban Kata (see here) as a method to build better software products.
The kata goes as follows:
1. Understand the direction/goal — Figure out the strategic intent of the product. Use tools at your disposal, working with users to clarify what they truly need solved, then phrase that as your goal.
2. Identify the target condition — Set a measurable condition that when reached, fulfills the goal.
3. Identify obstacles to the condition — What is preventing the product team from reaching that condition?
4. Plan out the steps needed to resolve the condition — Steps should not take longer than a week. Shorter experiment times leads to more rapid learning.
5. Hypothesize the expected result
6. Run the step & extract learnings
7. Start again with the resulting condition as the new current condition until the target condition is met — If the product team learns that the condition has not been reached yet, iterate the kata to continue drilling into the core obstacles.
aProduct managers who implement the product kata correctly will rapidly discover obstacles preventing target conditions to be met. You might also find that solutions may not reside in new features, but rather removing, optimizing, or changing the nature of existing ones.
