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

Dan Olsen (Author), Walter Dixon (Narrator), Gildan Media, LLC (Publisher)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 1,288 ratings
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The missing manual on how to apply Lean Startup to build products that customers love.

The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a start-up or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice.

The Lean Startup movement has contributed new and valuable ideas about product development and has generated lots of excitement. However, many companies have yet to successfully adopt Lean thinking. Despite their enthusiasm and familiarity with the high-level concepts, many teams run into challenges when trying to adopt Lean, because they feel like they lack specific guidance on what exactly they should be doing.

If you are interested in Lean Startup principles and want to apply them to develop winning products, this audiobook is for you. This book describes the Lean Product Process: a repeatable, easy-to-follow methodology for iterating your way to product-market fit. It walks you through how to:

  • Determine your target customers
  • Identify underserved customer needs
  • Create a winning product strategy
  • Decide on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
  • Design your MVP prototype
  • Test your MVP with customers
  • Iterate rapidly to achieve product-market fit

This book was written by entrepreneur and Lean product expert Dan Olsen, whose experience spans product management, UX design, coding, analytics, and marketing across a variety of products. As a hands-on consultant, he refined and applied the advice in this book as he helped many companies improve their product processes and build great products. His clients include Facebook, Box, Hightail, Epocrates, and Medallia.

Entrepreneurs, executives, product managers, designers, developers, marketers, analysts, and anyone who is passionate about building great products will find The Lean Product Playbook an indispensable resource.

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  1. Listening Length
    9 hours and 54 minutes
  2. Author
    Dan Olsen
  3. Narrator
    Walter Dixon
  4. Audible release date
    May 19, 2016
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    Gildan Media, LLC
  7. ASIN
    B01FV5Y7MA
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
  10. See all details
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Product details

Listening Length 9 hours and 54 minutes
Author Dan Olsen
Narrator Walter Dixon
Whispersync for Voice Ready
Audible.com Release Date May 19, 2016
Publisher Gildan Media, LLC
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B01FV5Y7MA
Best Sellers Rank #48,815 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
#310 in Entrepreneurship (Audible Books & Originals)
#458 in Business Management (Audible Books & Originals)
#674 in Leadership (Audible Books & Originals)

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
1,288 global ratings
Your one stop shop for learning how to build a successful product
5 Stars
Your one stop shop for learning how to build a successful product
This is the number one book I recommend to people who are interested in product. The Lean Product Playbook not only covers a wide range of different product techniques but also when to best use them and common pitfalls to avoid when implementing them.From identifying market opportunities to user research and product design to collaborating with engineers this book covers everything.As a product manager myself I refer to it often when encountering problems at work and use it to help navigate through uncertainty.Highly recommended - if you only read one book on product make sure this is it!
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Top reviews from the United States

Product Mgr Guy
5.0 out of 5 stars You need this book if you want to go Lean
Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2015
Verified Purchase
I’m a product manager who has been involved in the creation of a wide range of web and mobile products. Some have been great and some have bombed (unfortunately like many new products). The Lean Startup movement was a breakthrough for me and many others who work on technology products as it provided a framework for creating products that customers actually want. There are a lot of great Lean books that I’ve read including The Lean Startup, Running Lean, and The Four Steps to the Epiphany. The Lean Product Playbook is unique in that it takes the perspective of an entrepreneur or product manager and has a lot of very practical advice for putting the Lean principles into practice. The other Lean books provide some great information about Lean concepts, but I found that it was often hard to translate these concepts into real world actions. The Lean Product Playbook provides very practical advice for doing so. This book gives the reader a rare glimpse into what it takes to define a successful technology product. Most product leaders have to learn these lessons the hard way by just doing it and seeing what works and what doesn’t…..the school of hard knocks.

This book would be ideal for anybody who is taking the lead in defining a new tech product, but would also be useful for entrepreneurs, designers, and developers. Its good for pretty much anybody involved in the process of creating products.

There are some great concepts from the book that I have already started utilizing in my work. Some include:

- Problem space vs. Solution space - many product teams get these concepts confused. This book has a great discussion and examples that describe how you can identify a problem and a solution that meets the problem. The approach taken in this book is nuanced and very practical compared to other Lean books which tend to be much more dogmatic about how you identify the solution.
- Lean Product Process - the author walks you through a step-by-step process for achieving product / market fit.
- Feature selection - There is also a lot of great discussion about how you pick which features to include in the product. This is one of the hardest things to figure out as a product owner.
- User testing on a Ramen budget - some great ideas for doing user testing on the cheap.

Some of the ideas in this book can be found in other places, but this book does an amazing job of integrating those ideas + mixing in some great new ideas in a way that makes it easy to get going on your next great idea. I highly recommend this book!
15 people found this helpful
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DJD
5.0 out of 5 stars Everything you need and nothing you don't
Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2015
Verified Purchase
I've sampled about a dozen books on product management, and bought four or five. This one is my favorite. Dan Olsen brings a great combination of theory and practical experience to the problem of product management. Something that distinguished this book from the others was Dan's sense of practicality and humility. You get the sense that the book is written to actually help PM's manage actual products - not just to further the author's career. He's not trying to claim credit for making up a whole new theory; he supplies plenty of concepts of his own, but he's happy to include solid methodologies from other practitioners.

A few of the items I liked best:

* Problem space vs. solution space. This is a simple and clear way to frame the problem of product design, and a great way to get a team on the same page during the ideation and design phase.

* A survey of several methodologies for evaluating possible features, including Dan's own ROI-based approach. I like Dan's suggestion as it's lightweight and effective - which makes it easier to communicate and more likely to be used.

* A frank discussion of the usefulness of specification documents in Agile development environments. I'm not sure I'm totally in agreement with Dan on this one but his approach does seem more cognizant of reality than most.

Overall the signal/noise ratio in the book is extremely high. Obviously the book is heavily tilted towards consumer-oriented software products. The book would be a useful perspective for, say, CPG product managers, but its primary focus is certainly on software. For both aspiring and experienced product managers in that category, though, this book is indispensable.
One person found this helpful
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Justus Pendleton
4.0 out of 5 stars How to be a (modern) product manager.
Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2016
Verified Purchase
I have worked as a director of engineering at a brand-name post-IPO tech company. I have worked with product managers and group product managers, including people we hired from Microsoft, Spotify, Google, etc. I worked there for 8 years, from before we had a single product manager, and watched the product management discipline evolve.

I didn't learn anything new from this book, since it captures (more or less) how we work. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have value. This is the best one-book summary of how a modern product manager should approach building a product. I would happily give this to every product management new hire. It captures the current zeitgeist and, especially in the first half of the book, provides the execution details that are sometimes missing from otherwise great but theory-laden product development books. (I'm looking at you Principles of Product Development Flow!!!)

I knocked off a star because the book has some flaws that could be rectified in a future edition. Some topics are covered so superficially you'd almost be better served just by a link to the relevant wikipedia page (this was most noticeable in the sections on execution covering Scrum, Kanban, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Deployment). I would rather these sections be either shorter (just a reference to a more definitive book on the subject) or longer (and have more of a focus on how a product manager is affected by the topic or should drive change).

There were several sections where I felt the writing belabored obvious points and what was explained in 5 or 10 pages probably could have been done in 1 or 2. For instance, the example of "waves" of user testing that gradually refine the product or the examples of "equations" for business metrics. But again, take my opinion on this with a grain of salt because all of this stuff is how I'm used to working. Possibly readers who are newer to this approach NEED the long-winded explanations to see how it works in practice.

Due to the above two points, the last 1/3 of the book I skimmed large sections. But the first half or two-thirds of the book are really, really good.
16 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Ruben
5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible book with lots of practical advice
Reviewed in Canada on April 15, 2022
Verified Purchase
After reading "The Lean Startup", I did have a good idea on the lean movement and pattern that founders should follow to build theirs products. What I was lacking, however, is more of a step-by-step breakdown of what the process actually looks like starting from the idea to the first release. In his book, Dan covers a lot of those concepts with practical examples from identifying target customers to testing your MVP and iterating. I also found a lean product case study and agile tips in the end of the book incredibly helpful!
I highly recommend Dan's book to people who are after building great meaningful products and am very thankful to have come across it myself.
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Cliente Kindle
5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente!
Reviewed in Brazil on January 8, 2022
Verified Purchase
Os métodos práticos e aprofundados que o autor traz nos mostram como criar produtos bons diminuindo riscos e preservando recursos.
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Marcos Fernando Subía Carvajal
5.0 out of 5 stars Imperdible dentro de los TOP de Product Management
Reviewed in Mexico on November 23, 2021
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Para todos los que quieren adentrarse en el mundo de producto, este libro es un MUST!
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Best Book for the Lean practices in Business
Reviewed in India on September 23, 2023
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It is a must have book for lean practitioner and the business
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Daniel
5.0 out of 5 stars Product Bible, Playbook, Field Manual
Reviewed in Germany on November 4, 2022
Verified Purchase
Wow! This was the greatest education I received on becoming a true product expert.
I have learned so many things that can save startups from failure. This is THE entrepreneurship education you need to bring your ideas to life. I read it slowly and highlighted +500 ideas. It took me around 30 hours to finish. I loved it. And will apply it step by step.
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Daniel
5.0 out of 5 stars Product Bible, Playbook, Field Manual
Reviewed in Germany on November 4, 2022
Wow! This was the greatest education I received on becoming a true product expert.
I have learned so many things that can save startups from failure. This is THE entrepreneurship education you need to bring your ideas to life. I read it slowly and highlighted +500 ideas. It took me around 30 hours to finish. I loved it. And will apply it step by step.
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