The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

by Dan Olsen
Released June 2015
Publisher(s): Wiley
ISBN: 9781118960875

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Book description

The missing manual on how to apply Lean Startup to build products that customers love

The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a startup or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice.

The Lean Startup movement has contributed new and valuable ideas about product development and has generated lots of excitement. However, many companies have yet to successfully adopt Lean thinking. Despite their enthusiasm and familiarity with the high-level concepts, many teams run into challenges trying to adopt Lean because they feel like they lack specific guidance on what exactly they should be doing.

If you are interested in Lean Startup principles and want to apply them to develop winning products, this book is for you. This book describes the Lean Product Process: a repeatable, easy-to-follow methodology for iterating your way to product-market fit. It walks you through how to:

  • Determine your target customers

  • Identify underserved customer needs

  • Create a winning product strategy

  • Decide on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

  • Design your MVP prototype

  • Test your MVP with customers

  • Iterate rapidly to achieve product-market fit

    • This book was written by entrepreneur and Lean product expert Dan Olsen whose experience spans product management, UX design, coding, analytics, and marketing across a variety of products. As a hands-on consultant, he refined and applied the advice in this book as he helped many companies improve their product process and build great products. His clients include Facebook, Box, Hightail, Epocrates, and Medallia.

    Entrepreneurs, executives, product managers, designers, developers, marketers, analysts and anyone who is passionate about building great products will find The Lean Product Playbook an indispensable, hands-on resource.

    Table of contents

    1. Cover Page
    2. Title Page
    3. Copyright
    4. Dedication
    5. Contents
    6. Introduction: Why Products Fail and How Lean Changes the Game
    7. Part I: Core Concepts
      1. Chapter 1: Achieving Product-Market Fit with the Lean Product Process
        1. WHAT IS PRODUCT-MARKET FIT?
        2. THE PRODUCT-MARKET FIT PYRAMID
        3. QUICKEN: FROM #47 TO #1
        4. THE LEAN PRODUCT PROCESS
      2. Chapter 2: Problem Space versus Solution Space
        1. THE SPACE PEN
        2. PROBLEMS DEFINE MARKETS
        3. THE WHAT AND THE HOW
        4. OUTSIDE-IN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
        5. SHOULD YOU LISTEN TO CUSTOMERS?
        6. A TALE OF TWO APPLE FEATURES
        7. USING THE SOLUTION SPACE TO DISCOVER THE PROBLEM SPACE
    8. Part II: The Lean Product Process
      1. Chapter 3: Determine Your Target Customer (Step 1)
        1. FISHING FOR CUSTOMERS
        2. HOW TO SEGMENT YOUR TARGET MARKET
        3. USERS VERSUS BUYERS
        4. TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION LIFE CYCLE
        5. PERSONAS
      2. Chapter 4: Identify Underserved Customer Needs (Step 2)
        1. A CUSTOMER NEED BY ANY OTHER NAME
        2. CUSTOMER NEEDS EXAMPLE: TURBOTAX
        3. CUSTOMER DISCOVERY INTERVIEWS
        4. CUSTOMER BENEFIT LADDERS
        5. HIERARCHIES OF NEEDS
        6. THE IMPORTANCE VERSUS SATISFACTION FRAMEWORK
        7. RELATED FRAMEWORKS
        8. VISUALIZING CUSTOMER VALUE
        9. THE KANO MODEL
        10. PUTTING THE FRAMEWORKS TO USE
      3. Chapter 5: Define Your Value Proposition (Step 3)
        1. STRATEGY MEANS SAYING “NO”
        2. VALUE PROPOSITIONS FOR SEARCH ENGINES
        3. NOT SO CUIL
        4. BUILDING YOUR PRODUCT VALUE PROPOSITION
        5. SKATING TO WHERE THE PUCK WILL BE
        6. THE FLIP VIDEO CAMERA
        7. PREDICTING THE FUTURE WITH VALUE PROPOSITIONS
      4. Chapter 6: Specify Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Feature Set (Step 4)
        1. USER STORIES: FEATURES WITH BENEFITS
        2. BREAKING FEATURES DOWN
        3. SMALLER BATCH SIZES ARE BETTER
        4. SCOPING WITH STORY POINTS
        5. USING RETURN ON INVESTMENT TO PRIORITIZE
        6. DECIDING ON YOUR MVP CANDIDATE
      5. Chapter 7: Create Your MVP Prototype (Step 5)
        1. WHAT IS (AND ISN'T) AN MVP?
        2. MVP TESTS
        3. THE MATRIX OF MVP TESTS
        4. QUALITATIVE MARKETING MVP TESTS
        5. QUANTITATIVE MARKETING MVP TESTS
        6. QUALITATIVE PRODUCT MVP TESTS
        7. QUANTITATIVE PRODUCT MVP TESTS
      6. Chapter 8: Apply the Principles of Great UX Design
        1. WHAT MAKES A GREAT UX?
        2. THE UX DESIGN ICEBERG
        3. CONCEPTUAL DESIGN
        4. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
        5. INTERACTION DESIGN
        6. VISUAL DESIGN
        7. DESIGN PRINCIPLES
        8. COPY IS ALSO PART OF UX DESIGN
        9. THE A-TEAM
        10. UX IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
      7. Chapter 9: Test Your MVP with Customers (Step 6)
        1. HOW MANY CUSTOMERS SHOULD I TEST WITH?
        2. IN-PERSON, REMOTE, AND UNMODERATED USER TESTING
        3. HOW TO RECRUIT CUSTOMERS IN YOUR TARGET MARKET
        4. USER TESTING AT INTUIT
        5. RAMEN USER TESTING
        6. HOW TO STRUCTURE THE USER TEST
        7. HOW TO ASK GOOD QUESTIONS
        8. ASK OPEN VERSUS CLOSED QUESTIONS
        9. I FEEL YOUR PAIN
        10. WRAPPING UP THE USER TEST
        11. HOW TO CAPTURE AND SYNTHESIZE USER FEEDBACK
        12. USABILITY VERSUS PRODUCT-MARKET FIT
      8. Chapter 10: Iterate and Pivot to Improve Product-Market Fit
        1. THE BUILD-MEASURE-LEARN LOOP
        2. THE HYPOTHESIZE-DESIGN-TEST-LEARN LOOP
        3. ITERATIVE USER TESTING
        4. PERSEVERE OR PIVOT?
      9. Chapter 11: An End-to-End Lean Product Case Study
        1. MARKETINGREPORT.COM
        2. STEP 1: DETERMINE YOUR TARGET CUSTOMERS
        3. STEP 2: IDENTIFY UNDERSERVED NEEDS
        4. STEP 3: DEFINE YOUR VALUE PROPOSITION
        5. STEP 4: SPECIFY YOUR MVP FEATURE SET
        6. STEP 5: CREATE YOUR MVP PROTOTYPE
        7. STEP 6: TEST YOUR MVP WITH CUSTOMERS
        8. ITERATE AND PIVOT TO IMPROVE PRODUCT-MARKET FIT
        9. REFLECTIONS
    9. Part III: Building and Optimizing Your Product
      1. Chapter 12: Build Your Product Using Agile Development
        1. AGILE DEVELOPMENT
        2. SCRUM
        3. KANBAN
        4. PICKING THE RIGHT AGILE METHODOLOGY
        5. SUCCEEDING WITH AGILE
        6. QUALITY ASSURANCE
        7. TEST-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT
        8. CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION
        9. CONTINUOUS DEPLOYMENT
      2. Chapter 13: Measure Your Key Metrics
        1. ANALYTICS VERSUS OTHER LEARNING METHODS
        2. OPRAH VERSUS SPOCK
        3. USER INTERVIEWS
        4. USABILITY TESTING
        5. SURVEYS
        6. ANALYTICS AND A/B TESTING
        7. ANALYTICS FRAMEWORKS
        8. IDENTIFY THE METRIC THAT MATTERS MOST
        9. RETENTION RATE
        10. THE EQUATION OF YOUR BUSINESS
        11. ACHIEVING PROFITABILITY
      3. Chapter 14: Use Analytics to Optimize Your Product and Business
        1. THE LEAN PRODUCT ANALYTICS PROCESS
        2. A LEAN PRODUCT ANALYTICS CASE STUDY: FRIENDSTER'S VIRAL LOOP
        3. OPTIMIZATION WITH A/B TESTING
    10. Conclusion
    11. Acknowledgments
    12. References
    13. Resources
    14. About the Author

    Product information

    • Title: The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback
    • Author(s): Dan Olsen
    • Release date: June 2015
    • Publisher(s): Wiley
    • ISBN: 9781118960875