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The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback 1st Edition
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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.
- ISBN-101118960874
- ISBN-13978-1118960875
- Edition1st
- PublisherWiley
- Publication dateJune 2, 2015
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions6.3 x 1.2 x 9.1 inches
- Print length336 pages
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The Lean Product Process
The Lean Product Process guides you through each layer of the pyramid from bottom up. It helps you articulate and test your key hypotheses for each of the five components of product-market fit.
You can think of the Lean Product Process like the drills that karate students learn and practice as they make progress earning higher and higher belts. After mastering the core techniques from their drills and becoming black belts, students are able to mix, match, and modify what they have learned to create their own custom style. Martial arts master Bruce Lee eloquently said, "Obey the principles without being bound by them." He also said, "Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own."
I encourage you to heed his advice as you read and practice the ideas and guidance found in The Lean Product Playbook.
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.
For more information visit www.leanproductplaybook.com
Product details
- Publisher : Wiley; 1st edition (June 2, 2015)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 336 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1118960874
- ISBN-13 : 978-1118960875
- Item Weight : 1.15 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.3 x 1.2 x 9.1 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #41,191 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #21 in Production & Operations
- #300 in Entrepreneurship (Books)
- #453 in Business Management (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

Dan Olsen is a product management trainer, consultant, speaker, and author. At Olsen Solutions, he works with CEOs and product leaders to help them build great products and strong product teams.
Dan has worked with a range of businesses, from small, early-stage startups to large public companies, on a wide variety of products. His clients include Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber, Walmart, Microsoft, Box, eBay, HP, Medallia, and One Medical Group.
Prior to consulting, Dan was a product leader at Intuit and at several startups.
Dan earned a BS in electrical engineering from Northwestern and an MBA from Stanford. He also earned a master's degree in industrial engineering from Virginia Tech, where he studied the lean manufacturing principles that inspired the Lean Startup movement.
Dan is a regular keynote speaker at major product management, tech, design, and agile conferences. You can see his upcoming speaking events and view his previous talks at https://dan-olsen.com/speaking/.
Dan lives in Silicon Valley, where he founded the Lean Product Meetup, a monthly speaker series with over 11,000 members: https://meetup.com/lean-product.
Dan is the author of The Lean Product Playbook, one of the most popular product management books that teaches you how to create products that customers love. Learn more at https://leanproductplaybook.com.
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Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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This book would be ideal for anybody who is taking the lead in defining a new tech product, but would also be useful for entrepreneurs, designers, and developers. Its good for pretty much anybody involved in the process of creating products.
There are some great concepts from the book that I have already started utilizing in my work. Some include:
- Problem space vs. Solution space - many product teams get these concepts confused. This book has a great discussion and examples that describe how you can identify a problem and a solution that meets the problem. The approach taken in this book is nuanced and very practical compared to other Lean books which tend to be much more dogmatic about how you identify the solution.
- Lean Product Process - the author walks you through a step-by-step process for achieving product / market fit.
- Feature selection - There is also a lot of great discussion about how you pick which features to include in the product. This is one of the hardest things to figure out as a product owner.
- User testing on a Ramen budget - some great ideas for doing user testing on the cheap.
Some of the ideas in this book can be found in other places, but this book does an amazing job of integrating those ideas + mixing in some great new ideas in a way that makes it easy to get going on your next great idea. I highly recommend this book!
I didn't learn anything new from this book, since it captures (more or less) how we work. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have value. This is the best one-book summary of how a modern product manager should approach building a product. I would happily give this to every product management new hire. It captures the current zeitgeist and, especially in the first half of the book, provides the execution details that are sometimes missing from otherwise great but theory-laden product development books. (I'm looking at you Principles of Product Development Flow!!!)
I knocked off a star because the book has some flaws that could be rectified in a future edition. Some topics are covered so superficially you'd almost be better served just by a link to the relevant wikipedia page (this was most noticeable in the sections on execution covering Scrum, Kanban, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Deployment). I would rather these sections be either shorter (just a reference to a more definitive book on the subject) or longer (and have more of a focus on how a product manager is affected by the topic or should drive change).
There were several sections where I felt the writing belabored obvious points and what was explained in 5 or 10 pages probably could have been done in 1 or 2. For instance, the example of "waves" of user testing that gradually refine the product or the examples of "equations" for business metrics. But again, take my opinion on this with a grain of salt because all of this stuff is how I'm used to working. Possibly readers who are newer to this approach NEED the long-winded explanations to see how it works in practice.
Due to the above two points, the last 1/3 of the book I skimmed large sections. But the first half or two-thirds of the book are really, really good.
Top reviews from other countries
Leider ist die Aufmachung und das Druckbild des Buches alles andere als ein Hingucker. Die UX des Buches somit schlecht designed, eher so 1-2 Sterne.
I don't think anything in this book will surprise you if you are vaguely in that startup / lean world (unless you think you are but aren't ;-) but it might just give you some pointers as to your blind spots and how to actually, practically carry them out. It did for me.
The other major factor I like is that he is very honest in how he has carried out the research and it isn't overblown or unachievable for most (i.e. just re-hashing the methods that the latest unicorn did which doesn't really translate very often - Uber, which is occasionally mentioned, found a really untapped customer need with huge potential; this is quite rare as is obvious from its outstanding success). There is a lot of people out there that will tell you unless it's huge sample sizes and you are getting statistically significant evidence then it's not worth doing. This is impractical in many B2B cases where its high value but a niche product. He seems to agree and suggest a modest number of well done and structured tests can give you good (enough) insight. I liked this approach as it gets round the all or nothing and makes you apply some rigour to the middle pathway.
I highly recommend Dan's book to people who are after building great meaningful products and am very thankful to have come across it myself.
I have learned so many things that can save startups from failure. This is THE entrepreneurship education you need to bring your ideas to life. I read it slowly and highlighted +500 ideas. It took me around 30 hours to finish. I loved it. And will apply it step by step.
Reviewed in Germany on November 4, 2022
I have learned so many things that can save startups from failure. This is THE entrepreneurship education you need to bring your ideas to life. I read it slowly and highlighted +500 ideas. It took me around 30 hours to finish. I loved it. And will apply it step by step.
















