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

Chapter 12 Build Your Product Using Agile Development

At this point, you have validated your target customer, their underserved needs, your value proposition, your MVP feature set, and your UX. As a result, you should feel confident about the blueprint you've developed. Validating product-market fit with prototypes is incredibly valuable, but now it's time to turn your blueprint into an actual working product that customers can use.

Building the product you've defined is obviously a critical step, and solid execution really matters here. There are many risks that could impede you while trying to build your blueprint. You may run into issues with technical feasibility, where what you've designed is impossible or too challenging to build, either in general, or with the resources you have available. Your product may be feasible but have such a large scope relative to your resources that it will just take too long to build. Good market opportunities only exist for so long before competition moves them to the upper right quadrant of the importance's vs. satisfaction framework. An important part of product-market fit is having the right product at the right time (recall the product strategy discussion in Chapter 5). Even if you have an appropriate scope, poor execution can result in your actual product falling quite short of the promise of your prototype. You clearly want to minimize these types of risks—and the product development process you use can have a big impact on that. This ...