Biases are mental shortcuts for decision making. It’s like applying automatically and subconscious a rule of thumb. That is fast and saves energy but can lead to errors. To build great customer experiences, it's a no-brainer that we need to keep the customer at the center, understand their needs & pain points, but the problem interpretation & proposed solution often gets overpowered by our cognitive biases. For a product manager & designers, these biases can lead to bad decisions. But being aware of these biases and keeping them at bay, with a sound data-driven design approach can save the day.

I'll be talking about some real-life examples of such situations and share experience/ learnings on how we approached it in past.

You can't manage what you can't measure. - W. Edwards Deming

Most startups or organizations live by the above quote and start measuring loads of metrics and digging through pile of data to get meaningful insights. So much so that you waste the most precious resource i.e. "time" in implementing tons of tracking and data analysis and all it gives is a false feeling that things are in control and you know what you are building. More than tracking metrics or measuring output, the more important part is "What to measure" and "When to measure".

While Lean Startup concepts help you structure your progress & identify the riskiest parts of your business and then learn/ adapt to it,  Lean Analytics is used to measure that progress, helping you to ask the most important questions and get clear answers quickly.

In this presentation, we would look at a few ways to figure out what "must" be measured and "how", depending upon your business model and stage of growth.

A lot has been said about Kanban and how these can be implemented in Software development, but the learning remains superficial till we go deep down to its roots to understand the core underlying practices and principles and why/how these practices evolved over a period of time. Infact the roots of most of the Agile methods can be traced back to Lean/Toyota Production Systems, a set of practices and techniques used by Toyota to build great set of cars with limited amount of resources. Even though building software is much different than building a car, there are many lessons and practices that can be learnt and applied nonetheless.

In this interactive and visual talk, we'll take a virtual trip to Japan and learn some of the best practices/concepts that originated at Toyota for building "world-class" cars and see how each of these can be applied to software development. Learning about the roots of Lean should help the attendees in sowing the seeds of Lean improvement in their organizations and would help in building better software and improving the efficiency of the software delivery lifecycle.