MAIN IDEA
How do you make products that customers love and rave about?
You do that by making it feasible for customers to help you develop the product and then by iterating your way to the perfect Product-Market fit.
The best way to do this is by using a "Lean Product Process" and by following this approach:
Determine who your target customers are.
Get to know their unserved needs.
Define the ideal product's value proposition.
Design and create a minimum viable prototype.
Test that MVP prototype with actual customers.
Learn what customers love and hate.
Iterate and if necessary pivot.
Keep using customer feedback until you get the perfect fit between your product and the market.
DAN OLSEN is an entrepreneur and business consultant. His consulting firm, Olsen Solutions, works with companies to help them develop great products using Lean methodologies. He has worked with companies right across the spectrum from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Past clients have included Facebook, Microsoft, Medallia, XING and One Medical Group. Dan Olsen previously led the Quicken product team when he worked at Intuit and was cofounder and CEO of YourVersion, a personalized news startup. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
The Web site for this book is at www.LeanProductPlaybook.com.
This is a summary and not a critique or a review of the book. It does not offer judgment or opinion on the content of the book. This summary may not be organized chapter-wise but is an overview of the main ideas, view points and arguments from the book as a whole. This means that the organization of this summary is not a representation of the book.
Building a great product is hard work because it's easy to get sidetracked. The essence of what you're trying to achieve is easy to describe – you're trying to develop a product which meets customer needs (which make up the marketplace) better than all other alternatives. You're trying to achieve great Product-Market alignment.
"Throughout my career, I've worked on and studied many different products. When I analyze the root causes of why products fail, a common pattern emerges. The main reason products fail is because they don't meet customer needs in a way that is better than other alternatives. This is the essence of product-market fit."
– Dan Olsen
The key to building a great product is to bring to market something which is a perfect fit to the existing needs of the marketplace. Great products add significant value for customers in a way which is demonstrably better than all other alternatives.
To visualize this, the Product-Market dynamic can be broken down into five layers:
The Market consists of all existing and potential customers which have the same need or set of related needs. It has two layers:
Target customers – the total number of customers in the market or the total revenue generated by those customers.
The underserved needs of those target customers