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

This book is without a doubt one of the most useful guides I’ve ever read when it comes to applying Lean Product concepts to real-life situations. It guides you through a step by step (it’s a playbook!) strategy for helping you build better, more innovative products, and while you are reading it, it gives you key examples and engaging stories to illuminate each of the steps. Contrary to other “business” books I’ve read, this one is directed and insightful (and entertaining!), making me want to continue reading, and more importantly, enabled me to immediately utilize the strategies. The book offers a combined discussion of Lean Product process, UX Design, Agile Development, and Analytics, which truly covers everything you need to know to build great products that customers will love. One of the key ideas of the book revolves around Product-Market fit, and how to achieve it using a 6-step process. The steps are clear and concise, and the examples and included figures are very tangible and easy to understand. Additionally, this is one of the few books I’ve come across that clearly explains and puts into the proper context how to think about things such as UX design (a 4-layer model of conceptual design, information architecture, interaction design and visual design), User testing (and various methods of doing it quickly and cheaply), Personas, the Kano model, Kanban, and Scrum, to name a few. Whether you’ve already successfully implemented Lean Product principles, are looking to start, are having trouble applying the concepts, or maybe you just aren’t sure where to begin, I highly recommend this book.

I’m a product manager who has been involved in the creation of a wide range of web and mobile products. Some have been great and some have bombed (unfortunately like many new products). The Lean Startup movement was a breakthrough for me and many others who work on technology products as it provided a framework for creating products that customers actually want. There are a lot of great Lean books that I’ve read including The Lean Startup, Running Lean, and The Four Steps to the Epiphany. The Lean Product Playbook is unique in that it takes the perspective of an entrepreneur or product manager and has a lot of very practical advice for putting the Lean principles into practice. The other Lean books provide some great information about Lean concepts, but I found that it was often hard to translate these concepts into real world actions. The Lean Product Playbook provides very practical advice for doing so. This book gives the reader a rare glimpse into what it takes to define a successful technology product. Most product leaders have to learn these lessons the hard way by just doing it and seeing what works and what doesn’t…..the school of hard knocks. 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 have worked as a director of engineering at a brand-name post-IPO tech company. I have worked with product managers and group product managers, including people we hired from Microsoft, Spotify, Google, etc. I worked there for 8 years, from before we had a single product manager, and watched the product management discipline evolve. 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.

This is a great reference book for large-scale software products. Early in his career, Olsen designed nuclear-powered submarines and in one of the chapters he relates this to product design and development. Throughout the book Olsen shares several of his experiences managing projects like Quickbooks and Friendster. These accounts are often used to illustrate certain ideas. With regard to discussions about user testing, key metrics and analytics, I find it very helpful that the book includes tables, diagrams and mathematical equations along with charts to help visualize the concepts. He also uses plenty of hard data from successful projects that he has managed, and he often draws upon (and sometimes extends) ideas developed by various industry moguls. In chapters where the subject matter is beyond the scope of the book, he provides solid overviews and helpful guides to facilitate understanding. I particularly enjoyed the smooth, steady pace of this book. Olsen carefully defends his arguments, using narratives and different scenarios to clarify ideas that may be hard to understand. The topics from preceding chapters gradually build upon each other in steps, so parts of it read like an informative guide. Details about software development are not introduced until Chapters 7 and 8 (Part II). Chapters 1 to 6 are spent describing core concepts about the product market, its value, and target customers. Chapters 9 through 14 are deeply profound in their exploration of topics such as testing, design, software development, optimization, analytics and the measurement of key metrics. Overall, I would call this a great book with valuable reference material for scalable software products.

This is my first ever Amazon review so a couple quick disclaimers I always wonder about with these: 1) I don't know Dan 2) I loved the book and tweeted as much to Dan. He asked me to leave a review and I was happy to do so for zero compensation. Now, onto the review! I'm a tech founder and by default, product manager. I was never trained for the role. My education in product has been through experience and lots of education. This book is the best resource I have ever come across for how to be an effective PM and I'm applying it to my business. Here's my criteria: 1) Readable - 5/5. Dan's writing style is accessible. I never read a paragraph and thought to myself "What the heck did he just say?" 2) Actionable - 5/5. Most important, the book is action oriented. It's easy to take a chapter and apply directly to your business. 3) Cohesive - 5/5. Framework is my new favorite word. Seriously, if you are going to be a successful PM you need frameworks. Frameworks are lenses through which your decisions are more effective and efficient. And there is no dogma here. Dan pulls from various sources for his frameworks, not just his own head. I appreciate the different perspectives. The overarching Product Market fit framework is powerful and is central to my love of this book. 4) Study-able - 5/5. There are books you read once and never touch again. Then there are books you STUDY. This is the latter and my ultimate compliment for LPP. Great read. So great in fact that after I finished the kindle version, I just picked up the Audible version :)

I've sampled about a dozen books on product management, and bought four or five. This one is my favorite. Dan Olsen brings a great combination of theory and practical experience to the problem of product management. Something that distinguished this book from the others was Dan's sense of practicality and humility. You get the sense that the book is written to actually help PM's manage actual products - not just to further the author's career. He's not trying to claim credit for making up a whole new theory; he supplies plenty of concepts of his own, but he's happy to include solid methodologies from other practitioners. A few of the items I liked best: * Problem space vs. solution space. This is a simple and clear way to frame the problem of product design, and a great way to get a team on the same page during the ideation and design phase. * A survey of several methodologies for evaluating possible features, including Dan's own ROI-based approach. I like Dan's suggestion as it's lightweight and effective - which makes it easier to communicate and more likely to be used. * A frank discussion of the usefulness of specification documents in Agile development environments. I'm not sure I'm totally in agreement with Dan on this one but his approach does seem more cognizant of reality than most. Overall the signal/noise ratio in the book is extremely high. Obviously the book is heavily tilted towards consumer-oriented software products. The book would be a useful perspective for, say, CPG product managers, but its primary focus is certainly on software. For both aspiring and experienced product managers in that category, though, this book is indispensable.

Diving into the field of Product Management, this is the first book I've read that gave me a comprehensive scope of the knowledge and skills necessary to design a good product. It starts at a satisfying high-level before diving into the specifics of customer discovery, identifying underserved needs, MVPs, agile development, defining KPIs and using analytics to optimize your business. This book does a satisfying dive into the relevant formulas where necessary without being overly math-heavy. There's a good balance of concept, formula, and case studies from the author's experience as a PM. I'd recommend this book as a primer for anyone interested in product management, entrepreneurship, or software development. Additionally, seek out Dan Olsen's talks on Youtube if you'd like to sample the content before buying The formulas and additional breakdowns in the book are definitely a value add that the video content can't touch.

Good advice and perspective for someone new to product management. Makes it easy to understand concepts. Would recommend to any other newbies.