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

Chapter 10 Iterate and Pivot to Improve Product-Market Fit

I explained in the previous chapter how to conduct a wave of user tests to assess your MVP's product-market fit. This chapter is about what to do after you complete each round of testing. Lean is about learning and iterating quickly. This means that you want to use what you have learned after you receive a round of feedback to modify your hypotheses and your MVP so that you can test them with customers again. You want to iterate quickly from one round of user testing to the next with the goal of improving product-market fit each time. This chapter will walk you through how to do that.

THE BUILD-MEASURE-LEARN LOOP

Eric Ries discusses the above concept of iterative learning in his book The Lean Startup (The Lean Startup is a registered trademark of Eric Ries). His “build-measure-learn” loop has helped many people understand the importance of iteration and validated learning. But based on my observations of how some people talk about and try to apply the loop, there are some nuances worth discussing.

It's important to clarify that “build” doesn't mean that you have to actually build a product. Creating a set of clickable wireframes that you test with users is perfectly acceptable. “Build” simply means having something that you can test with customers, which could be a live product or design artifacts, such as wireframes or mockups. “Design something to test” is a broader, more accurate description, so I prefer the label “design” ...