The Lean Product Playbook Quotes

“When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there.”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“The Lean Product Process consists of six steps: Determine your target customers Identify underserved customer needs Define your value proposition Specify your minimum viable product (MVP) feature set Create your MVP prototype Test your MVP with customers”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“As entrepreneurs, product managers, developers, and designers, we love to spend our time coming up with cool new feature ideas and designing great user experiences. However, those items sit at the top two levels of the pyramid of user needs. First and foremost, the product needs to be available when the user wants to use it. After that, the product's response time needs to be fast enough to be deemed adequate. The next tier pertains to the product's quality: Does it work as it is supposed to? We then arrive at the feature set tier, which deals with functionality. At the top, we have user experience (UX) design, which governs how easy—and hopefully how enjoyable—your product is to use. As with Maslow's hierarchy, lower-level needs have to be met before higher-level needs matter.”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“The main reason products fail is because they don't meet customer needs in a way that is better than other alternatives.”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“You can tell the level of collaboration by how often team members refer to one another as “we” instead of “they.”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“Demographic Segmentation Demographics are quantifiable statistics of a group of people, such as age, gender, marital status, income, and education level. Say you were developing an app for moms to easily share photos of their babies with friends and family. You could describe your target customers demographically as women 20 to 40 years old who have one or more children under the age of three. If you are targeting businesses, you'll use firmographics instead; these are to organizations what demographics are to people, and include traits such as company size and industry.”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“Agile thought leader Bill Wake created a set of guidelines for writing good user stories; to make them easier to remember, he uses the acronym INVEST: Independent: A good story should be independent of other stories. Stories shouldn't overlap in concept and should be implementable in any order. Negotiable: A good story isn't an explicit contract for features. The details for how a story's benefit will be delivered should be open to discussion. Valuable: A good story needs to be valuable to the customer. Estimable: A good story is one whose scope can be reasonably estimated. Small: Good stories tend to be small in scope. Larger stories will have greater uncertainty, so you should break them down.”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“Focus is critical when defining a new product.”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“A good product is designed with focus on the set of needs that are important and that make sense to address together.”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“Customers don't care about your solution. They care about their problems.” Keeping problem space and solution space separate and alternating between them as you iteratively test and improve your hypotheses is the best way to achieve product-market fit.”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“Usability answers the question, “Can customers use your product?” Delight answers the question, “Do customers enjoy using your product?”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“fidelity refers to how closely the artifact looks like the final product, whereas interactivity means the degree to which the customer can interact with the artifact”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“Changing customer behavior is always difficult—especially in the upper right quadrant—and you need to create a certain amount of excess value to get customers to switch from a product they routinely use. The notion of needing to have “10×” better performance comes to mind again.”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“The real-world manifestation of software products that customers see and use is the user experience (UX), which is the top layer of the Product-Market Fit Pyramid. Beyond software, this is also true for any product with which the customer interacts. The UX is what brings a product's functionality to life for the user.”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“You can think of this as a three-tier ​pyramid with must-haves on the bottom, performance features just above that, and delighters at the top.”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“Good interviewers excel at listening closely to what customers say, repeating statements back to ensure understanding, and asking additional probing questions to illuminate the problem space.”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“I developed a framework and process for how to achieve product-market fit.”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“As a [type of user], I want to [do something], so that I can [desired benefit].”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“What Info Should a Persona Provide? Good personas convey the relevant demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and needs-based attributes of your target customer. Personas should fit on a single page and provide a snapshot of the customer archetype that's quick to digest, and usually include the following information: Name Representative photograph Quote that conveys what they most care about Job title Demographics Needs/goals Relevant motivations and attitudes Related tasks and behaviors Frustrations/pain points with current solution Level of expertise/knowledge (in the relevant domain, e.g., level of computer savvy) Product usage context/environment (e.g., laptop in a loud, busy office or tablet on the couch at home) Technology adoption life cycle segment (for your product category) Any other salient attributes”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

“Here are descriptions of the five customer segments: Innovators are technology enthusiasts who pride themselves on being familiar with the latest and greatest innovation. They enjoy fiddling with new products and exploring their intricacies. They are more willing to use an unpolished product that may have some shortcomings or tradeoffs, and are fine with the fact that many of these products will ultimately fail. Early Adopters are visionaries who want to exploit new innovations to gain an advantage over the status quo. Unlike innovators, their interest in being first is not driven by an intrinsic love of technology but rather the opportunity to gain an edge. The Early Majority are pragmatists that have no interest in technology for its own sake. These individuals adopt new products only after a proven track record of delivering value. Because they are more risk averse than the first two segments, they feel more comfortable having strong references from trusted sources and tend to buy from the leading company in the product category. The Late Majority are risk-averse conservatives who are doubtful that innovations will deliver value and only adopt them when pressured to do so, for example, for financial reasons, due to competitive threats, or for fear of being reliant on an older, dying technology that will no longer be supported. Laggards are skeptics who are very wary of innovation. They hate change and have a bias for criticizing new technologies even after they have become mainstream.”
― Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback