The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

by Dan Olsen

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.

Usability answers the question, “Can customers use your product?” Delight answers the question, “Do customers enjoy using your product?”

The conceptual design, the iceberg's bottom layer, is the underlying concept that forms the essence of the user experience. The next layer is information architecture, which determines how you structure your product's information and functionality. The next layer is interaction design, which defines how the user and your product interact with one another. The top layer that sticks above the water—the portion of the iceberg that users see—is visual design: how your product looks.

Three major components of visual design are color, typography, and graphics.

According to the Gestalt principle of proximity, the brain perceives objects that are closer together as more related than objects that are farther apart. Therefore, you should put related objects close to one another in your designs.

The Gestalt principle of similarity maintains that the brain perceives objects that share similar characteristics as more related than objects that don't share those characteristics. Therefore, in your designs, objects that are similar or related should look similar by having the same shape, size, or color.

The quality of the copy on marketing pages can result in major differences in your conversion rate. But the copy you use in your product—labels, instructions, descriptions, and error messages—can really affect usability.

I like to call a team who has this set of four essential skills—product management, interaction design, visual design, and front-end development—the “A-Team” (like the popular 1980s television show). Other roles or skills are obviously important to deliver a great product: back-end developers, quality assurance (QA), DevOps, and so forth. But when it comes to creating a great UX, having an A-Team is critical.

I recommend conducting user tests with one customer at a time for the best results. You can speak with more than one customer at a time, but you usually get suboptimal results due to group dynamics.

If you're up for guerrilla tactics, another option is what I call Starbucks user testing, where you spend time at a cafe and test with people you recruit on the spot. The main benefits of this method are its low cost and immediacy. The main drawback is that you're not able to closely control the type of customers with whom you speak.

There are three distinct elements of your product that users will give you feedback on: functionality, UX, and messaging.

Feedback on functionality has to do with whether your MVP addresses the right benefits or not. Users may complain that a key feature is missing or tell you that a feature you've

You may have the right feature set that's addressing the right benefits, but have a poor UX that prevents users from taking full advantage of your feature set.

Finally, you may have the right features and UX, but the way you talk about your features, benefits, and differentiators—your messaging—may not resonate with customers.

Feedback on usability has to do with how easy it is for customers to understand and use your product, whereas feedback on product-market fit has to do with how valuable they find your product.

poor usability often prevents users from seeing the full value your product provides. You may discover that you have bugs that get in the way, too. Messaging that doesn't resonate with customers can also be a stumbling block.

You need to explicitly assess product-market fit by asking how much they value your product.

You must be clear on your rank order priorities at any point in time; but you must also be able to quickly incorporate new or changing requirements. I use the analogy of water and ice. Most of the time, your backlog is like ice; the rank order is frozen and fixed. But when new requirements come in or priorities change, you briefly melt the ice into liquid water so you can rearrange things. Once you're done reordering your backlog, you freeze it again. Following this approach means that your backlog will be up to date whenever anyone looks at it.

Smaller scope stories and tasks result in smaller estimation errors. Dividing user stories into smaller pieces usually requires that you think about them in more detail, which also reduces uncertainty and risk.

Attitudinal information is what customers say about their attitudes and opinions.

In contrast, behavioral information has to do with what customers actually do.

qualitative tests, the kind of research that relies on direct observation of customers.

In contrast, you generate quantitative information by aggregating the results from many customers.

Both qualitative and quantitative learning are important and actually complement each other. Quantitative research can tell you how many customers are doing (or not doing) something. But it won't tell you why the customers are doing it (or not doing it). On the flip side, qualitative research will help you get at the underlying reasons for why customers do what they do. But it won't tell you how many people do what they do for each particular reason.

It's worth mentioning that the full version of Rohrer's framework also includes a third dimension for “context of use.” He distinguishes between the different contexts of product use for each research method: “natural use” (e.g., analytics), “scripted use” (e.g., usability tests), and “not using the product” (e.g., discovery interviews). I encourage you to explore his full framework, which categorizes 20 different UX research methods. You can find it on the Nielsen Norman Group website at http://nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods. You can see Rohrer's other publications and blog posts at http://xdstrategy.com.

product. Dave called his framework “Startup Metrics for Pirates” because if you make an acronym for his five metrics—acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral—it spells “AARRR!” (with an exclamation point added for good measure).

Why not focus on acquisition instead? That would mean sending a lot more prospects to your front door. However, many of those prospects aren't going to become customers if your conversion rate is lower than it should be. By optimizing conversion first you will see a much higher return on your investment when you do focus on acquisition, because a higher percentage of prospects will turn into customers.

Most high-tech companies, especially those trying to achieve product-market fit, are much more focused on increasing revenue than reducing cost. That is because the economics of most high-tech products are such that as you achieve a higher volume of sales, the incremental revenue from each additional unit (called marginal revenue) exceeds the incremental cost to produce that additional unit (called the marginal cost). And the gap between marginal revenue and marginal cost grows larger as the volume grows larger.

I wanted to identify “normalized” ratio metrics that enabled apples-to-apples comparisons over time.

Many companies have incorporated A/B testing into their product release process, especially when making major changes. Instead of instantly switching from the old version of their product by launching the new version, they keep the old version running for almost all users and “launch” the new version to a small percentage of users. Then, they compare key metrics across the new and old versions. Before ramping up the percentage of users who see the new version, the product team wants to make sure the metrics targeted for improvement are performing better and that other key metrics aren't materially worse. This process, called throttling, is a great way to apply Lean principles to reduce risk after you've launched your product.

For software products, the list of skills includes product management, user research, interaction design, visual design, copywriting, Agile development, front-end coding, back-end coding, QA, DevOps, and analytics.

The product manager drives the ball down the court by writing user stories and prioritizing the backlog. The product manager passes the ball to the interaction designer, who designs the flows and wireframes and then passes the ball to the visual designer. The visual designer creates the look and feel with high-fidelity mockups and passes the ball to the developer. The developer, who implements the product based on the user stories and mockups, shoots the ball and scores the basket.