The Lean Product Playbook

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.

• Introduction: Why Products Fail and How Lean Changes the Game
• Part I: Core Concepts
1. Achieving Product-Market Fit with the Lean Product Process
• What Is Product-Market Fit?
• The Product-Market Fit Pyramid
• Quicken: from #47 to #1
• The Lean Product Process
2. Problem Space versus Solution Space
• The Space Pen
• Problems Define Markets
• The What and the How
• Outside-In Product Development
• Should You Listen to Customers?
• A Tale of Two Apple Features
• Using the Solution Space to Discover the Problem Space
• Part II: The Lean Product Process
3. Determine Your Target Customer (Step 1)
• Fishing for Customers
• How to Segment Your Target Market
• Users versus Buyers
• Technology Adoption Life Cycle
• Personas
4. Identify Underserved Customer Needs (Step 2)
• A Customer Need by Any Other Name
• Customer Needs Example: TurboTax
• Customer Discovery Interviews
• Customer Benefit Ladders
• Hierarchies of Needs
• The Importance versus Satisfaction Framework
• Related Frameworks
• Visualizing Customer Value
• The Kano Model
• Putting the Frameworks to Use
5. Define Your Value Proposition (Step 3)
• Strategy Means Saying "No"
• Value Propositions for Search Engines
• Not So Cuil
• Building Your Product Value Proposition
• Skating to Where the Puck Will Be
• The Flip Video Camera
• Predicting the Future with Value Propositions
6. Specify Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Feature Set (Step 4)
• User Stories: Features with Benefits
• Breaking Features Down
• Smaller Batch Sizes Are Better
• Scoping with Story Points
• Using Return on Investment to Prioritize
• Deciding on Your MVP Candidate
7. Create Your MVP Prototype (Step 5)
• What Is (and Isn’t) an MVP?
• MVP Tests
• The Matrix of MVP Tests
• Qualitative Marketing MVP Tests
• Quantitative Marketing MVP Tests
• Qualitative Product MVP Tests
• Quantitative Product MVP Tests
8. Apply the Principles of Great UX Design
• What Makes a Great UX?
• The UX Design Iceberg
• Conceptual Design
• Information Architecture
• Interaction Design
• Visual Design
• Design Principles
• Copy Is Also Part of UX Design
• The A-Team
• UX Is in the Eye of the Beholder
9. Test Your MVP with Customers (Step 6)
• How Many Customers Should I Test With?
• In-Person, Remote, and Unmoderated User Testing
• How to Recruit Customers in Your Target Market
• User Testing at Intuit
• Ramen User Testing
• How to Structure the User Test
• How to Ask Good Questions
• Ask Open versus Closed Questions
• I Feel Your Pain
• Wrapping Up the User Test
• How to Capture and Synthesize User Feedback
• Usability versus Product-Market Fit
10. Iterate and Pivot to Improve Product-Market Fit
• The Build-Measure-Learn Loop
• The Hypothesize-Design-Test-Learn Loop
• Iterative User Testing
• Persevere or Pivot?
11. An End-to-End Lean Product Case Study
• MarketingReport.com
• Step 1: Determine Your Target Customers
• Step 2: Identify Underserved Needs
• Step 3: Define Your Value Proposition
• Step 4: Specify Your MVP Feature Set
• Step 5: Create Your MVP Prototype
• Step 6: Test Your MVP with Customers
• Iterate and Pivot to Improve Product-Market Fit
• Reflections
• Part III: Building and Optimizing Your Product
12. Build Your Product Using Agile Development
• Agile Development
• Scrum
• Kanban
• Picking the Right Agile Methodology
• Succeeding with Agile
• Quality Assurance
• Test-Driven Development
• Continuous Integration
• Continuous Deployment
13. Measure Your Key Metrics
• Analytics versus Other Learning Methods
• Oprah versus Spock
• User Interviews
• Usability Testing
• Surveys
• Analytics and A/B Testing
• Analytics Frameworks
• Identify the Metric That Matters Most
• Retention Rate
• The Equation of Your Business
• Achieving Profitability
14. Use Analytics to Optimize Your Product and Business
• The Lean Product Analytics Process
• A Lean Product Analytics Case Study: Friendster
• Optimization with A/B Testing
15. Conclusion