The Lean Product Playbook

Quotes from The Lean Product Playbook

“Even in Agile, you should design before you code; you’re just doing so in much smaller increments.”

“The best way to mitigate the risk of an ‘inside-out’ mindset is to ensure your team is talking with customers.”

Expert Reviews

“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

“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

“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 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.

Who should read this book

• Entrepreneurs and Startup Founders: Those looking to refine their product development process and achieve product-market fit through validated learning and iterative design.
• Product Managers:  Professionals aiming to enhance their skills with practical frameworks and tools for building user-centered products.
• UX/UI Designers:  Designers who want to align their design processes with lean principles and user feedback to create effective, user-friendly products.
• Business Analysts and Strategists:  Individuals seeking to understand the lean product development approach and apply data-driven strategies to improve product success rates.

Publisher’s Note

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.