To The Point; a recipe for creating lean products
Post update: ToThePoint was the eBook that evolved into the Lean Inception book.
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Last night I did a mindmap on the ToThePoint book. I was interested in understanding what have influenced me for coming up with such recipe. I did use a retrospective activity for it. I used the story of a story retrospective activity. The activity result helped me understanding the path that took me to the ToThePoint book. Looking at my own timeline (from 2006 to today), I have created the following mindmap which summarizes it.
ToThePoint book mindmap
Basically there were three major influences on this book:
Lean Start-up
I have lived on Silicon Valley from 2000 to 2007. I worked on several start-ups back on these days. But I felt the learning cycle–from idea to a real product—was way too long. Such feeling drove me towards the Lean Start-up movement, which culminated with Eric Ries amazing Lean Start-up book (2010).
Agile
Since 2000 I have been using Agile Methodologies. In 2000 I met Kent Beck at the OOPSLA conference. I bought his newly released book and started using XP practices as a developer. In 2006 I joined Thoughtworks and got exposed to many people using all sorts of agile methodologies. Scrum, Kanban and FDD are some of the names that influenced me the most. After a few years my understanding was beyond a framework or its practices. Principles and value started being natural to me.
Design Thinking
I was first introduced to Design Thinking several years ago by Jeff Patton. It was 2006 when I was introduced to the collaborative agile inceptions, and many activities around personas, user journeys and story mapping. Then I got Design Thinking into every day development and product planning meetings. When I started leading the product discovery phase, design thinking was my facilitation and work style.
