All you need to know about Lean Product Development
“Lean” is not only a buzzword. Lean methodologies can be key to success in today’s product development. Lean thinking can help us, Product Managers, to focus on solving customer problems, validating ideas early, building up an environment of learning and experimenting, reducing waste and shorten delivery times.
We’ve collected the best 10 books that tackle the topic of lean product development that might help you in your day-to-day business as a Product Manager.
The Lean Startup
How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
by Eric Ries
Büşra Coşkuner — Senior Product Manager at Doodle says
As you’ll see my book recommendations are mostly about lean product development as this is the mindset that I advocate to work and train my mentees on. Wherever possible of course. Therefore, I’d like to start with the bible for every person who’s working lean. This is the first book you should read if you want to get into the lean mindset and develop products or even businesses with a lean approach.
338 pages, Currency 2011
Lean Analytics
Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster
by Benjamin Yoskovitz and Alistair Croll
Gregor Meyenberg — Head of Product at Event Inc says
I have read a few of the lean books (of course including Lean Startup from Eric Ries), but this one is probably the one where I got the most out of it. As a PM I always worked a lot with data to better understand the user. This book taught me which KPI matter in which phase of a product life cycle and how to find that one metric. I still use it from time to time as a reference.
440 pages, O’Reilly Media 2013
Lean UX
Designing Great Products with Agile Teams
by Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden
Why read?
You’ll learn how to drive the design in short, iterative cycles to assess what works best for the business and the user.
208 pages, O’Reilly Media 2016
UX for Lean Startups
Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design
by Laura Klein
What the author says
I hope that everybody who reads the book will be able to learn from their customers and turn that information into products that people will actually buy. I want startups to stop building things people don’t want and can’t use.
240 pages, O’Reilly Media 2013
Running Lean
Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works
by Ash Maurya
Florian Gansemer — Managing Director at kununu engage says
Everyone is talking about the book „Lean Startup“ which of course started this trend. I like the version of Ash Maurya better because it’s more practical and gives you step-by-step information about HOW you actually start and validate your business. It’s full of case studies and tools on how you ensure you’re actually solving a real existing problem and how to validate that you’re on the right way to solve it.
240 pages, O’Reilly Media 2012
The Lean Entrepreneur
How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets
by Brant Cooper & Patrick Vlaskovits
Clement Kao — Product Manager at Blend says
Much of product management rests on the value proposition, which is essential “the bundle of benefits you’ll grant to the customer at some proposed cost.” Given that the viability of the value proposition isn’t knowable until you test it with customers, Cooper and Vlaskovits provide clear frameworks for how to test the value proposition. I found this book incredibly helpful in framing my approach to validating my value proposition hypotheses. By investing time upfront to understand the customer, you’ll save time later by ensuring that you don’t build the wrong product.
“A sprawling overview of some of the biggest ideas in the start-up world.”
— Seth Godin (Author The Icarus Deception)
224 pages, Wiley 2016
The Principles of Product Development Flow
Second Generation Lean Product Development
by Don Reinersten
Barry O’Reilly — Author, Speaker and Founder says
Product Development, Economics and Work Flow all rolled into one. Groundbreaking work. This book challenges an awful lot of fashionable ideas on improving product development processes. It provides a vast number of very solid principles that could make a big difference for almost any product development organization, from beginners to the most advanced. It offers a fundamentally different way of thinking about product development processes. Don’t read it if you are content with business as usual!
304 pages, Wiley 2009
Treasure Roadmap
How to turn your idea into a successful business
by Momčilo Dakić
Opinion by the author
This detailed roadmap will show you how to select, define, launch, refine, and make money from your idea. You will read the book all in one breath and use it over and over again to seek advice regardless of the stage of your business development. This book will lead you to financial and personal excellence. The book offers a set of tools emerging from lean start-up, design thinking, and agile software development that are revolutionizing how new ideas are created, refined and brought to market.
163 pages, Amazon Digital Services LLC 2019
Validating Product Ideas
Through Lean User Research
by Tomer Sharon
Christian Becker — Founder of leanproductable says
When I started with product management it was usual that any research had to run through the marketing department. I had to write a lengthy briefing, then the marketing department would give advice on how to answer the question (most likely after consulting one of their suppliers) and come back with a price and timeline. After freeing the budget, the supplier could get going and after another couple of weeks, they presented some slides with data. Impact on the product was close to zero — simply because the friction between the actual question at hand and the market research was way too high. I think that every product manager should be able to do research independently. Tomer’s book is a great start with some hands-on advice on how to get going.
344 pages, Rosenfeld 2016
The Lean Product Playbook
How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback
by Dan Olsen
Henrik Hedegaard — Head of Product Experience at Parabolic.io says
The book provides step-by-step guidance on how to apply lean principles to product development. Typically, this can be quite tedious and has many pitfalls. The book helps you improve the chances of building successful products. It discusses concepts such as the product-market fit pyramid, and a repeatable methodology to achieve that fit. If you’re into product metrics part 3 of the book is for you. It provides tools on what/how to measure. Finally, it’s a book that discusses the bastardised MVP — when utilised in a lean context, it’s quite a productive tool.
336 pages, Wiley 2015
Do you think that there’s a book missing in this list? Any other comments or feedback? Get in touch or let us know in the comments below.
