Product Management in Practice: A Practical, Tactical Guide for Your First Day and Every Day After

by Matt Lemay

Sure, no working product manager I know has ever used a business model canvas to fully invent a new product from scratch in a real-world organization. But many product managers I know have used the ideas from a business model canvas to focus and sharpen their thinking in advance of a product ideation session. Similarly, no working product manager I know has ever told me that their organization is taking a perfectly by-the-book approach to “minimum viable product,” a core concept from Eric Ries’s book The Lean Startup (Currency) that has become ubiquitous in the world of product development. But many have told me that the conversation around “minimum viable product” helped their organization ask some really important questions about how often they are learning from their customers and how they are defining “done enough.”