The lean product playbook

What Hacker News says

1. JugurthaJul 2024
   >The sort of skills that would eventually allow me to run my own company/team/org.

   These are different things. Running your own company more often than not implies you have started the company, and the skills you need to start and run a company are different in and of themselves, let alone the fact they're different from running a team in an established company/organization where you never think about how the power is still on.

   In smaller companies and startups, the opportunity to learn is yours if you want it and the incentive to do so is survival. The company is small enough that you can, if you're so inclined, be involved in and learn about everything.

   I answered a few questions on some topics you might find relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40482961

   There are a few replies there about communication and alignment. More (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25288605)

   A FAANG is so large that the acronym is just five letters, and procuring whiteboard markers to them could be the biggest contract another company ever had.

   What you want is to expand the spectrum of your involvement or "ownership". One way of doing that is to learn to sell into the enterprise.

   Imagine you are a startup and you want to sell your product to [insert your company]. How would you go about it? It teaches you many things: What problem does it solve? For whom is it a problem? Why is it a problem? Why now? Are they aware it is a problem? Have they tried solving that problem? What outcome and why wasn't it solved? What does winning look like (success criteria)? For whom? Who are the owners and stakeholders? Who has the budget? Who is the competition [it could be internal competition]? Will this make or break someone's career if it's a success/failure? Who can torpedo the effort? Who's green-light do you need? Who's non red-light do you need? How does that align with the company's strategy? How do you scope that solution? What features are table stakes? How do you manage the product's roadmap (what not to build and what to build and why)? Does everyone know why they're doing what they're doing and can they make decisions unsupervised? What's important for each one at the table (legal, security, IT, infra, finance, sales, marketing, etc.)? You'll learn how to reason from each one's perspective (even make their own case for them) in order to orchestrate and find ways to drive the effort forward.

   All these will be really useful because, even if you are still at that company, you'll have to learn how to do it to get buy in for whatever project or product or project you're working on or direction of the product you think is right, to get the resources you need, get the people you need (or to prevent adding more people, both are important).

   Do you hang out with people starting start-ups? They surely talk about the problems they're facing and you could learn a lot brainstorming with them? Talking with people starting different startups exposes you to a variety of problems, solutions, and thought processes. You could notice patterns.

   A few books that could come in handy:

   - "Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth" - Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo's founder).

   - David Skok's "For Entrepreneurs" - https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/ and https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/zero-to-100/

   - "The Lean Product Playbook" - Dan Olsen

   - EnterpriseReady - https://www.enterpriseready.io/#features

   - "Lean B2B" - Étienne Garbugli

   - "High Output Management" - Andrew Grove

   - MEDDIC sales (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify/Implicate the pain, Champion). That's a known sales framework

   - Michael Dearing on Pricing https://web.archive.org/web/20160318134158/https://www.heavy...

   - "Predictable Revenue" - Aaron Ross

   - "Founding Sales" - Peter Kazanjy (I haven't read that one but I've heard good things)

   - "When software and people mix" - Gail Goodman - Business of software 2012 (https://vimeo.com/54076835)

   - "Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business" - Jason Cohen at Microconf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw

   - How to Build a Startup - Steve Blank on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAwxTw4SYaPnxzSuovATB...)

   - Marc Andreessen's archive, but start with this: "The only thing that matters". https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html

   Whatever you do, you know the whole customer development and product market fit and ensuring there's a market and that you have distribution? Most people know that and still, the temptation to build before is strong. That's why I started my list with Gabriel Weinberg's "Traction".

   All the best. Happy to exchange throughout your quest.

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2. collin128Mar 2023
   Steve Blank's blog (not a book, I know) + The Startup Owners Manual also by Steve Blank.

   Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen.

   The two helped me understand what it meant to 'get out of the building'.

   7 Powers + Good Strategy Bad Strategy helped me think long term about the business model and evolution of the company.

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3. bwbSep 2022
   1. Leaders Eat Last Deluxe: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't

   We gave this to every employee at the business, as it models the type of culture and leaders we wanted to grow. For me personally, it put down on paper what I had been trying to do for years. It was something I reread often to try to improve my manager/leadership skills. This type of thinking helped me become a better CEO (it wasn't instant).

   2. Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works

   Great books on tactics and strategy; it helped me improve why we did things and created a much better approach to problems.

   3. 4. Lean B2B: Build Products Businesses Want and The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

   Totally changed how I approach building solutions and testing ideas. I learn how to do customer dev interviews and go from learning to testing what problems I am hearing and so on. I’ve flipped through each of them 50+ times as I construct the next interview or so on. I particularly like the Product Playbooks method to evaluate different problems and the value individuals put on them. They have been helpful as I’ve started to learn, and I’ve got a long way to go.

   I wish I had these 10 years previous; it would have saved a lot of money.

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4. akg_67Jun 2021
   A list of books I posted in another thread:

   * Steve Blank’s The Startup Manual or Four Step to Epiphany.

   * Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook

   * Ryan Singer, Shape Up

   * Jake Knapp, Sprint

   * Jeff Patton, User Story Mapping

   * Stephen Wunker, Costovation

   * Jackie Bavaro, Cracking the PM Career

   Also checkout /r/productmanagement subreddit.

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5. autheticityMay 2021
   What do your users say and do?

   Do you know about user interviews and user research? Here's a great short intro: https://www.slideshare.net/xamde/summary-of-the-mom-test

   I strongly recommend learning about product management and user research. Read The Mom Test and The Lean Product Playbook and do what's relevant. Start there!

   Happy to discuss more and share more resources that could help. Email in profile.

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6. autheticityMay 2021
   It's not clear if the biggest problem you have is 1. potential users / customers not understanding what problem you solve, 2. that the problem isn't one of their big problems, 3. that your user onboarding needs to be improved, or 4. that their current solutions are satisfactory or 5 something else. Identify it, focus on it, try things related to it.

   You are likely a member of your target market - how and why would you talk to a random person or company about some problem or product?

   Customer feedback is a combination of analytics, conversation, and observation. You are already getting some!

   Talk with users, potential users, and people that leave and find out why. However your users want to be talked to (consider in person, conferences, video chat, differently worded or timed email, chat in the website, surveys, possibly but probably not the phone given the audience). Turn the random text based messages into bigger conversations.

   Observe people using your website, signing up to use your product, using your product. What works great? What can be improved?

   For getting customer feedback, look into user research and user interviews. This might involve giving people incentives e.g. gift cards to participate.

   Read The Mom Test. Short summary here: https://www.slideshare.net/xamde/summary-of-the-mom-test

   Other resources:

   - https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-research-cheat-sheet/

   - https://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/

   - How to do a user research interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq3OiHQ-HCU

   Relatedly, for users falling off, look into "user onboarding"

   Here's a useful resource on marketing, messaging, and communication: https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro No need to reinvent the wheel - follow the tried and true paths.

   There's a San Francisco based developer marketing agency / co-op / investor agency. I can't recall the name. They have had some prominent developer focused companies over the past decade. They have good resources, including videos on YouTube.

   Can you succinctly communicate how you solve some annoying problem people have even if it's small? Of course it's technical, and developers are averse to a lot of marketing, so imitate successful similar companies / products e.g. Twilio, Netlify, GitLab, etc., or whoever has marketing you like. Think about what they look like, what they say, when they send you emails, the entire experience of using the product. Your UX won't be as big and polished - you're trying to build it up and improve it. But small things can add up.

   Generally useful resources:

   - Short branding exercise: https://library.gv.com/the-three-hour-brand-sprint-3ccabf4b7...

   - Working backwords (do the first part of this): https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2006/11/working_backwar... explained here https://www.quora.com/What-is-Amazons-approach-to-product-de...

   - Kevin Hale video on building products users love: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12D8zEdOPYo

   - Lean Startup (if you haven't read it already, if you have read or skim it again)

   - Lean Product Playbook - super practical

   - Four Steps to Epiphany: https://web.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-bin/winter/drupal/up...

   Email in profile if you want more guidance / advice.

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