Book Summary: The Lean Product Playbook

‘The Lean Product Playbook’ — by Dan Olsen

The Lean Product Playbook

by Dan Olsen

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Resonating Message

To create a successful product — you need to satisfy all layers of the Product-Market fit pyramid, ensuring you’re clear on who you are targeting the product for, what their needs are, and then creating a compelling offering that satisfies those needs with a compelling value proposition, feature set, and UX. The Lean Product Process sets out a six-step process to achieve this:

1. Determine your target customers
2. Identify underserved or unmet needs
3. Define a compelling value proposition
4. Identifying an MVP feature set
5. Creating your MVP prototype
6. Testing your MVP with customers

Chapter in one sentence

1. Achieving Product-Market Fit with the Lean Product Process: Building a product isn’t enough. You must ensure you understand the market forces — and build a product that connects with that market through a product-market fit.
2. Problem Space versus Solution Space: You must separate and use different techniques for the problem and solution space — leading first with the problem spaced focused on emphasizing with and understanding the needs of your target customer, before delving into the solution space of addressing those needs.
3. Determine your Target Customer (Step 1): Once you understand the problem space, your goal is to identify a target customer and associated segment that you believe has unmet or underserved needs aligned with your target product vision.
4. Identify Underserved Customer Needs (Step 2) The goal now is to identify and elaborate on the needs of your customer — identifying underserved or unmet needs through empirical measurement against the desired outcomes of the target customer.
5. Define Your Value Proposition (Step 3) You will define your value proposition by establishing your hypothesized product benefits (must-haves, performance, and delighters) in comparison to your competitors — both in the current market and the predicted future to ensure you’re addressing the most important anticipated needs.
6. Specify Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP)…