The Lean UX book arrived on my iPad last night, and I’ve just finished reading it cover to cover. I thought it was great.
That judgement is not actually because I work with the authors Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden. I find most business books to be pretty banal, and I promise you that I would just stay silent if I didn’t really like the results here.
Lean UX is a great read for any product person — whether they call themselves a UX designer, product manager, dev manager, whatever. This is about approaching product in a better way, not just UX.
The book effectively balances strategic and tactical. There are some very actionable things you can take away from the book and try to convert to your particular situation. It is also nicely concise, and doesn’t fall into the trap of repeating itself over and over (the curse of many a business book).
If nothing else, you should pick up the book to understand the core principles behind Lean UX, and evaluate if they could/should work for your context:
– cross-functional teams (small, dedicated, ideally co-located)
– problem-focused teams
– progress = outcomes, not output (i.e. results over features)
– removing waste
– small batch sizes
– continuous discovery and learning
– getting out of the building
– shared understanding
– team over rockstar
– externalizing work (including communicating up and across org)
– making over analysis
– learning over growth
– permission to fail
Conclusion: definitely two thumbs up from me. Go get it if you haven’t already.