The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen
- The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen focuses on innovating with Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) and rapid customer feedback.
- The book emphasizes the high failure rate of new products due to not meeting customer needs better than alternatives; this is the essence of product-market fit.
- Marc Andreessen coined the term product-market fit, stating that startups fail because they never achieve it.
- The Lean Startup movement emphasizes achieving product-market fit; however, many enthusiasts struggle with its practical application.
- The book provides step-by-step guidance to fill knowledge gaps and apply Lean Startup principles effectively.
- Dan Olsen developed the Product-Market Fit Pyramid, a framework that breaks down product-market fit into five key components:
- Target Customer
- Underserved Customer Needs
- Value Proposition
- Feature Set
- User Experience (UX)
- The Lean Product Process consists of six steps:
- Determine your target customers
- Identify underserved customer needs
- Define your value proposition
- Specify your minimum viable product (MVP) feature set
- Create your MVP prototype
- Test your MVP with customers
- The book covers UX design, Agile development, and analytics for optimizing products.
- The author's background includes electrical engineering, nuclear submarines, industrial engineering, and an MBA, with experience at Intuit and various startups.
- The book is intended for anyone involved in building products, including entrepreneurs, product managers, designers, developers, marketers, analysts, program managers, CEOs, and executives.
- A companion website, http://leanproductplaybook.com, is available for sharing and discussing new ideas.
- The book is divided into three parts: Core Concepts, The Lean Product Process, and Building and Optimizing Your Product.
- Problem space (customer needs) versus solution space (product implementation) is a key concept.
- NASA's space pen story illustrates the risk of prematurely jumping to solution space versus starting with the problem space.
- Problems define markets, and market disruptions occur when a new solution better meets market needs.
- Outside-in product development starts with understanding customer needs before designing a solution, contrasting with inside-out development.
- Customers are not likely to invent breakthrough products, but understanding their needs is essential.
- Apple's Touch ID fingerprint sensor is an example of successfully meeting customer needs while the redesigned power button on MacBook Pro is an example of failure to do so.
- Customers provide better feedback in the solution space than in the problem space, helping to refine the problem space definition.
- Step 1 of the Lean Product Process involves determining the target customer through market segmentation (demographic, psychographic, behavioral, needs-based).
- Technology Adoption Life Cycle (Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, Laggards) influences target market selection; Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm is important.
- Personas help describe the target customer and are not real people but hypothetical archetypes. Key information includes name, photo, quote, job title, demographics, needs/goals, motivations, tasks, frustrations, expertise, usage context, and technology adoption life cycle segment.
- Potential problems with personas include weak information, over-detailing, and lack of use by the product team.
- Step 2 in the Lean Product Process focuses on underserved customer needs.
- Customer needs can be called customer benefits, desires, user stories, or pain points.
- A customer need by any other name - various terms such as customer desires, wants, user goal or pain points all refer to customer needs.
- Customer Benefit by stating it precisely with action verbs shows what the product will do for the customer.
- Customer Discovery Interviews helps you to see if the way your description is clear to users with the use of interview questions and techniques such as Customer Benefit Ladders.
- Customer benefit ladders and The Five Why’s shows how to determine the ultimate motivation that leads to the top of the benefit ladder.
- Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs provide the implication that a higher-level need doesn’t matter unless more basic needs below it are met like the Hierarchy of Web User Needs.
- The Importance versus Satisfaction Framework includes quadrants and a quantitative evaluation with measurement scales and real data to determine how to solve potential opportunities.
- Measuring importance and satisfaction involves unipolar (5-point) and bipolar (7-point) rating scales.
- An Importance and Satisfaction Example is provide with real data for the formula and its calculations.
- Related frameworks includes Gap analysis and Jobs to Be Done (Anthony Ulwick).
- Visualizing customer valuable involves an importance versus satisfaction framework, measuring opportunity, and improving product value.
- Visualized Opportunity to Add Value is calculated by the area of the rectangle to the right of the importance vs. satisfaction space while the height represent customers. The higher that potential score means you should focus on the ones with the higher opportunity scores.
- The Kano Model developed by Noriaki Kano allows you to classify to customer benefits by must-haves, performance features, and delighters.
- Understanding must-haves, features, and delighters, the importance vs. performance, and high/importance, low /satisfaction will help you to determine which ones allow you to create the most customer value.
- Step 3 aims to define your product value proposition, including stating what “your product won’t solve” since strategy means saying no and focus on the set of needs that make sense to address.
- Search engine value propositions, including not-so-cuil, is provided as an example that strategy means saying No and having a more accurate understanding of the market in which your product is really competing to avoid being a ‘‘me too’’ product.
- Creating a Product Value Proposition includes a chart for easy articulation of how you are going to improve performance.
- Skating to Where the Puck Will Be requires one to anticipate the upcoming trends in your market or what competition is likely to do; an example of the flip video camera is used.
- A product value proposition with expected future states and strategy should be used when creating the columns in the chart (Competitors now vs in 1 year and your product now vs in 1 year). That way when you are looking at the problem.
-Step 4 is to Specify Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Feature Set with customer benefits and clear Agile User Stories.
-To further prioritize and narrow down functionality, you can focus not only on value but on return of investment as well so that features are written from benefits of the customer’s perspective.
-There is a sample persona written where you can understand target customers with the list of needs, motivations, attitudes, frustrations and behaviors which is known as INVEST.
-Use a test-oriented approach where you use a well-organized format that contains everything from name to needs to product use to convey all of the relevant attributes of your target customer.
-In step 5, you create your MVP prototype. The goal is not just building, instead, to find the artifact that lets you test your assumption while consuming the least resources. Be careful not to stretch past your viable stage just for the sake of doing the bare amount.
-You want to test your landing page, prototype design, mockups, and other early design ideas to test some of those hypothesis.
-In step 6 which involves the heart of your entire framework, Test your MVP with customers. Make sure these are the right customers!
-Before user-testing, ensure this is followed by: a clear and objective point of view, well hypothesis, priorities are made clear, stay with a minimal scope, and talk to real customers for valuable feedback.
-Different types of tests require different prototypes such as the UX Design Iceberg, and having the A-team group of members will help test results.
-To get valuable quality data you want to conduct User interviews with one customer for deep understanding and keep it to qualitative research to avoid any biases.
