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

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John Wiley & Sons, Jun 2, 2015 - Business & Economics - 336 pages

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.

 

Contents

Achieving ProductMarket Fit with the Lean
3
3
31
4
37
7
52
8
63
Specify Your Minimum Viable Product MVP
77
13
84
Apply the Principles of Great UX Design
111
Contents
187
Build Your Product Using Agile Development
201
16
207
Measure Your Key Metrics
229
17
247
20
257
Use Analytics to Optimize Your Product
259
Optimization with AB Testing
272

Chapter 9
118
Test Your MVP with Customers Step 6 How Many Customers Should I Test With? InPerson Remote and Unmoderated User Testing
148
15
155
How to Capture and Synthesize User Feedback
161
Iterate and Pivot to Improve
167
An EndtoEnd Lean Product Case Study
181
Acknowledgments
283
Index
291
25
293
77
299
111
306
About the Author
309

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About the author (2015)

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.

For more information visit www.leanproductplaybook.com

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