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

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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Everyone knows that most new products fail and that building great products is hard. The Lean Product Playbook provides clear, step-by-step guidance to help you create successful products.

Lean Startup has contributed valuable ideas about product development and generated lots of excitement. But despite their enthusiasm and familiarity with the high-level concepts, many teams run into challenges trying to adopt Lean because they lack specific guidance on what to do and how to do it.

If you are interested in Lean Startup principles and want to apply them to create 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
• Define your minimum viable product (MVP)
• Design your MVP prototype
• Test your MVP with customers
• Iterate rapidly to achieve product-market fit

This book includes two detailed, end-to-end case studies to drive home the concepts. It also describes how to build your product using Agile development and how to use analytics to optimize your product and business.

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

From the Back Cover

THE HOW-TO GUIDE FOR CREATING PRODUCTS THAT CUSTOMERS LOVE

"If you want to create successful, innovative products that customers love, Dan's playbook is a must-read."
—Hiten Shah, Co-founder of KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg

"Dan's product expertise was incredibly helpful in the early days of building and growing Box. I found his advice incredibly valuable — and if you want to build a successful product, you will too."
—Aaron Levie, CEO, Box

"A great, detailed guide on how to find product-market fit and make things people will love. This book should be required reading for everybody building products."
—Laura Klein, Author of UX for Lean Startups

"Dan Olsen makes product development simple and logical. If you want to create kick-ass products, you need to read this book."
—Dave McClure, Founding Partner and Troublemaker, 500 Startups

"Dan's playbook is the missing manual on how to apply Lean Startup principles. This comprehensive, straightforward book guides you through everything you need to know to build a winning product."
—Sean Ellis, CEO of Qualaroo and GrowthHackers.com

"Dan takes Lean Startup to a new level with his step-by-step playbook for creating great products! This book truly is for everyone—from designers to business people to engineers."
—Kaaren Hanson, VP Design, Medallia and former VP Design Innovation, Intuit

"Dan Olsen is an established Lean product black belt in Silicon Valley. His book gives product teams a simple and straightforward way to identify product-market fit, launch an MVP and then improve it systematically over time."
—Ken Fine, Chief Customer Officer, Medallia

About the Author

DAN OLSEN is an entrepreneur, consultant, and Lean product expert. He works with CEOs and product leaders to build great products and strong product teams, often as interim VP of Product. Dan's clients include Facebook, Box, Hightail, Medallia, Financial Engines, and One Medical Group.

At Intuit, Dan led the Quicken product team to record sales and profit. He also led product management at social networking pioneer Friendster and was cofounder and CEO of TechCrunch award winner YourVersion, a personalized news startup.

A frequent speaker at business and technology events, Dan lives in Silicon Valley where he hosts the Lean Product Meetup.