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

So much valuable, actionable insight. Awesome.

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!

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.