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

Conclusion

My goal for this playbook is to help you create products that customers love. It began with the Product-Market Fit Pyramid—an actionable model that defines the components of product-market fit and how they are connected. Your market consists of your target customers and their needs, and your product is the combination of your value proposition, feature set, and user experience. When you try to achieve product-market fit, you make critical hypotheses at each of these five layers.

The Lean Product Process guides you through the formulation and testing of your hypotheses with these six steps:

1. Determine your target customers
2. Identify underserved customer needs
3. Define your value proposition
4. Specify your minimum viable product (MVP) feature set
5. Create your MVP prototype
6. Test your MVP with customers

The process starts in the problem space and progresses to the solution space. You begin by determining your target customers, which you describe using personas. To create the most value for customers, you use the importance versus satisfaction framework to identify their important but underserved needs. Using the Kano model, you define a differentiated value proposition that better meets those needs for your target customers. You then take an MVP approach, trying to identify the minimum set of functionality required to deliver the key parts of your value proposition. You bring your MVP feature set to life by applying the principles of great UX design to create a prototype with ...