LEAN PRODUCT PLAYBOOK: BOOK SUMMARY
Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision continuously © Eric Ries
Building products that users love is hard. We’re all aware of the crucial statistics about the high percentage of new products that fail. For every Facebook and other success stories you know, there are countless failed products.
Think of all the apps you’ve used in the last year. How many of these products do you love? How many do you hate? How many can you even remember? The answer is that you actually love the very limited number the apps you use. We all know the reason that leads to failure: a lot of products don’t meet customer needs in a way that is better than other alternatives. This is the essence of product-market fit.
The Lean Startup method was created by Eric Ries that has helped popularize the idea of product-market fit and the importance of achieving it. He begun a movement that becomes more and more popular every day.
So, what is product-market fit and how to achieve it?
Dan Olsen, evangelist of Lean Product Development created a framework called the Product-Market Fit Pyramid, which was first published in his book The Lean Product Playbook, please feel free to follow this link to read the book.
The framework describes the product-market fit as a system of five key components:your target customers, your customer’s underserved needs, your value proposition, your feature set, and your user experience (UX). Each element is a testable hypothesis (see Figure 1).
The Product-Market Fit Pyramid gives the idea of The Lean Product Process that guides you through each layer of the pyramid from the bottom up. It gives you a tool to build your great product.
The Lean Product Process consists of six steps:
- Identify your target customers
- Determine underserved customer needs
- Define your value proposition
- Specify your minimum viable product (MVP) feature set
- Create your MVP prototype
- Test your MVP with customers
Let’s look at each of the 6 steps in more detail.
The first step for Lean Product: Identify your target customers
It all starts with target customers, who ultimately decide how well your product meets their needs. You should split the market into segments to understand who your target customer is. A great way to determine your target customer is to create Persona — a precise definition of your user and what he wishes to accomplish.
You can not have a precise definition of your target customer in the beginning: this is normal. You just need to start with a high level of hypothesis, and then revise it as you learn and iterate.
Determine underserved customer needs
You should think on determining what needs do your customers have that your product could satisfy. The goal is to validate your hypothesis on the user’s problem space before you set out to design a solution.
Define your value proposition
Summarize your ideas describing why a consumer should use your product. You should convince a potential consumer that your particular product will add more value or better solve a problem than other similar offerings.
Specify your minimum viable product (MVP) feature set
You shouldn’t start with designing a new product that delivers on you full value proposition, since that would take too long and be too risky. The best way to build MVP is to identify the basic functionality required to validate that you are moving in the right direction.
Create your MVP prototype
In order to test your MVP with customers, you need to create UX that you can show to customers and get their feedback.The goal is to build that kind of prototype that reflects the type of test you want to conduct with customers.
Test your MVP with customers
As soon as you’ve applied the best UX principles to create a prototype of your MVP, you should test it with users. User testing allows you to validate or invalidate your hypotheses and collect an incredibly valuable feedback that will show you the facts that you don’t know.
Several waves of user testing can be implemented depending on the feedback you’ve got. As a result, you’ll have an improved MVP and can start.
development of the great app.A lot of startups begin with an idea for a product that they think people want. They spend a lot of time perfecting that product without even showing it to potential customers. This approach leads to failure. Analyzing experience of the latest successful apps demonstrates us that applying Lean Product principles is one of the best ways to create the app that your users will love.
By Helen Shapoval,
Project Manager @ Seductive Mobile.
Approved by Dan Olsen himself, please feel free to see his Tweet here.
