Book SummaryThe Lean Product Playbook, by Dan Olsen

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Lean Product Playbook

Does creating a successful product feel like a risky gamble? In The Lean Product Playbook (2015), entrepreneur Dan Olsen argues that product success doesn’t have to be left to luck: By making sure your product has product-market fit—that it satisfies customer needs better than other available options—you can be confident in its success. Olsen provides a practical guide to finding product-market fit using the lean startup approach, presenting repeatable and systematic steps for identifying target customers, understanding their needs, and creating a winning product strategy. By following Olsen’s Lean Product Process, you can craft winning products with minimum time, effort, and...

The Lean Product Playbook Summary Stage 1: Design a Product With Product-Market Fit

According to Olsen, product-market fit determines whether a product succeeds or fails. When you have a product-market fit, your product satisfies customer needs better than existing products on the market.

(Shortform note: In Blue Ocean Strategy, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne advise that the best way to find product-market fit is to go further than merely improving upon your competitors: You should create a product for which there are no competitors by meeting customer needs that no other product currently addresses. By doing so, you’ll operate in a “blue ocean”—an uncontested market space that will allow for more success than a “red ocean” that’s "bloodied" by fierce competition. Thus, as you work to achieve product-market fit, aim to find ways to make your product so unique that competitors become irrelevant.)

In the following sections, we’ll discuss Olsen’s steps for designing a product with product-market fit by gaining a broad understanding of your target market’s needs and planning a product that can meet...

The Lean Product Playbook Summary Stage 2: Validate Your Product Idea With a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

At this point, you’ve created your product’s value proposition and have a clear idea of the needs you want your product to address. Now, it’s time to determine how your product will address those needs and then verify whether your product design actually resonates with your target market. You can do this by building and testing a minimum viable product (MVP).

Creating a fully functional product is time-consuming and risky since you haven’t yet validated whether customers would want to buy it. An MVP is a simplified, bare-bones version of your product. It consists of only the most critical features and functions needed to validate assumptions about your product. Olsen argues that building an MVP is the fastest and cheapest way to test your hypotheses and gather feedback on your product design. In this section, we’ll go through the steps to do so.

(Shortform note: Some experts argue that the business world has gotten more competitive, and creating an MVP—a bare-bones solution with a narrow set of features—might not be enough anymore. Instead, they suggest you create a Minimum Lovable Product (MLP). An...

The Lean Product Playbook Summary Stage 3: Build and Optimize Your Product

After you’ve tested your product and validated its product-market fit, the next step is to build and launch your product. Olsen suggests you use an “Agile” product development methodology. With an Agile approach, you’ll break projects into small cycles of work—as opposed to following a traditional “waterfall” or sequential approach of crafting a detailed plan at the beginning of a project and working continuously and consistently until every step of the plan is completed in its predetermined order.

Segmenting a project into smaller pieces increases flexibility, collaboration, and customer-centric thinking, allowing you and your team to respond quickly and adapt to changes. It also reduces the margin for errors seen in larger projects and allows you to put deliverables in front of customers sooner.

According to Olsen, the two most popular Agile methodologies are Scrum and Kanban. Scrum divides work into small manageable parts called “sprints,” typically lasting one to four weeks. Kanban involves visualizing tasks by putting cards featuring user stories on a board, allowing teams to see the workflow and manage it effectively. Olsen suggests experimenting with one for a few...

Shortform Exercise: Discover High-Value Needs For Product-Market Fit

According to Olsen, your product must satisfy customer needs better than competitors on the market to achieve product-market fit. Consider how you can discover and fulfill your target market’s most important yet least satisfied needs.

Who is your target customer? Jot down several of the four types of characteristics (demographics, psychographics, needs, and behaviors) that could categorize someone into your target market.