Luke Szymer on Agile, Testing Hypotheses, and Process Behavior Charts

Founder of “Launch Tomorrow.”

Episode page with transcript, video, and more

My guest for Episode #452 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Luke Szyrmer. He's the founder of “Launch Tomorrow.” He helps new technology products get to market faster (even remotely).

Luke is the author of the books Align Remotely: How to achieve together, when everyone is working from home and Launch Tomorrow: Take Your Product, Startup, or Business From Idea to Launch in One Day.

He's the host of the highly rated “Managing Remote Teams” podcast. He comes from a product management background and has a BA in Economics and English from the University of Pennsylvania.

He's joining us on the podcast from Poland.

Today, we discuss topics and questions including:

• Background question — How did you get introduced to Agile, Lean Startup, things like that?
• “Fuzzy side of innovation”?? — time wasted 20-30 years ago?
• Doing the wrong things righter?
• Tampering – and increasing variation
• Processes for creating software?
• When you were reading about “Lean Manufacturing”? How does that resonate with? How does that relate to you and your work?
• How easy is it to estimate “story points”?
• Lean Thinking – batch vs flow… physical flow vs. work flow — Adaptations to the flow of software?
• Takt time – how to translate this in terms of required software, requirements, points
• How did you learn about Process Behavior Charts?
• Why did that resonate with you?
• How do you incorporate PBCs into your work?
• Counting physical products vs. story points (something more esoteric)?
• Landing pages – product or service that doesn't exist yet
• What to test BEFORE a landing page?
• How to make a good decision with limited data points?
• What's so powerful about testing an idea as a hypothesis?

The podcast is sponsored by Stiles Associates, now in their 30th year of business. They are the go-to Lean recruiting firm serving the manufacturing, private equity, and healthcare industries. Learn more.

This podcast is part of the #LeanCommunicators network.