The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen is a must read for anyone involved in product management. It’s filled with practical advice and provides simple step by step guidance to build successful products.
This post is a summary of the key ideas, processes and tools mentioned in the book.
The Product – Market Fit Pyramid
This model defines the components required to create products that customers love and the connections between them.
Achieving Product-Market Fit means that your product meets real customer needs and does so better than the alternatives.
Market = Target Customers + Their underserved needs
Product = Your Value Proposition + Product Features + User Experience
Each layer in the pyramid depends on the layer immediately beneath it. Product Market Fit lies between the top and bottom sections of the pyramid.
The pyramid is hierarchical i.e you have to start at the bottom and work your way up.
At each of these five layers, you make critical hypotheses and test them using the six step Lean Product Process
Few other points to note are
- Focus on “what” the product needs to accomplish before getting into the “how”.
- Talk to customers, understand their needs and then start building your product rather than the other way around.
- Customer feedback may not help you create innovative products, but it ensures you don’t get lost on your way to innovation.
- Customers don’t care about your solution. They care about their problems.
The Lean Product Process
Step 1 : Determine your target customers
- You can develop hypotheses about your target market, but you won’t truly know who your customers actually are until you throw your hook into the water and see what kind of fish bite.
- This is the base of the pyramid on which every other step should depend upon
- For example, in the next step “Identify Needs” we only focus on the needs of target customers identified here.
Tools to use
Step 2 : Identify their underserved needs
- You have to address customer needs that aren’t adequately met with available alternatives.
- You don’t want to enter a market where customers are extremely happy with available solutions.
- Once you have an initial set of hypothetical customer benefits you feel good about, it’s time to test them with users. The best way to do so is via one-on-one, in-person customer discovery interviews.
- The reasons why customers find certain benefits valuable are the gold nuggets you want to mine.
- As you talk with customers, you can keep asking them, “Why is that important to you?” until it doesn’t lead to any new answers.
- Needs migrate over time.
- Yesterday’s delighters become today’s performance features and tomorrow’s must-haves.
- You have to meet basic needs before you can get credit for performance features. And your product must be competitive on performance features before delighters matter.
Tools to Use
- Customer Discovery Interviews
- Customer Benefit Ladders
- Importance Vs Satisfaction Framework
- Gap Analysis
- Kano Model
Step 3 : Define your value proposition
- How will your product be better than others?
- In order to have a shot at beating the incumbent market leader, the value proposition for your new product would have to at least match them.
- A clear value proposition decreases the likelihood that you are just launching a “me too” product, focuses your resources on what’s most important, and increases your chances of success.
Tools to use
Step 4 : Specify your minimum viable product (MVP)
- For your MVP, you want to identify the minimum functionality required to validate that you are heading in the right direction.
- Call this an MVP candidate instead of an MVP because it is based on your hypotheses. You haven’t yet validated with customers that they agree that it is, in fact, a viable product.
- For each benefit in your product value proposition, you want to brainstorm as a team to come up with as many feature ideas as you can for how your product could deliver that benefit.
- The longer you work on a product without getting customer feedback, the more you risk a major disconnect that subsequently requires significant rework.
- The goal is to make sure that your MVP candidate includes something that customers find superior to others products and, ideally, unique.
Tools to Use
Step 5 : Create a MVP prototype
- The goal is to build a prototype that lets you test your hypotheses.
- While it’s true that an MVP is deliberately limited in scope relative to your entire value proposition, what you release to customers has to be above a certain bar in order to create value for them.
- In general, when you are first starting to develop your product or marketing materials, it is most beneficial to start with qualitative tests to gain some initial understanding.
- You can even show customers your competitor’s marketing materials to learn what they’ve explained well and what they haven’t and to test your differentiation.
- One good way to test your overall messaging is the five-second test. The idea is to show customers your home page or landing page for just five seconds and then ask them to tell you what they remember and what they liked.
On UX Design
- A great design may lead you to what psychologists call a state of “flow,” where you are completely immersed in using the product.
- No matter how easy to use or beautiful a product is, it can’t deliver a great user experience if the customer doesn’t value the benefits the product provides.
- If customers are able to figure out how to use a feature, but it requires too many steps or takes too long, that results in poor usability. Efficiency is easy to assess by measuring effort. You can simply count the number of clicks, taps, keystrokes, or other user actions required to complete a task in a certain UX. Likewise, you can measure how much time it takes users to complete each task.
- The more user effort required to take an action, the lower the percentage of users who will take that action. The less user effort required, the higher the percentage of users who will take that action.
- User experiences that seem to read the user’s mind can help create delight. By selecting smart default choices on the user’s behalf or proactively addressing top-of-mind questions, a product can make users feel like it understands them and is empathetic.
- If the product is going to take a while to complete the requested task, it is important to give users a sense of progress and how much time remains.
- You should avoid making unrelated objects look alike.
- The need to accommodate multiple screen sizes is a reality of modern-day software design.
- At the end of the day, your customer is the ultimate judge of how good your user experience is, which impacts your product-market fit.
Tools to Use
MVP Tests
Qualitative – marketing materials, wireframes, mockups, interactive prototypes, wizard of oz and live product
Quantitative -A/B tests, crowdfunding, video and ad campaigns, smoke test and fake door testing
Step 6 : Test with customers
- You have become more familiar with your product than any new user could ever be. As a result, you have “product blindness”: blind spots for the issues that a new user will readily encounter within minutes of using your product.
- Conduct user tests with one customer at a time for the best results.
- By speaking with one customer at a time, you don’t experience any of those negative group dynamics, and you’re able to have a richer, more in-depth conversation.
- Testing in waves of five to eight customers at a time strikes a good balance.
- The ability to watch customers use our product in their real world setting gave us lots of valuable insights.
- It’s important to explicitly tell users up front that you want their honest feedback, even if it’s negative.
- The point of user testing is not to make ourselves feel good; the point is to get objective feedback from real customers.
- Actual customer behavior trumps customer opinions any day.
Tools to Use
- In person testing
- Moderated remote testing
- Unmoderated remote testing
P.S I highly recommend you read the book in its entirety for a comprehensive understanding of the mentioned concepts.
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