The Lean Product Development Process
Lean product development process is an iterative process that requires us to revise hypothesis, designs, and product as we make progress, all of which could be considered rework (Olsen, 2015). The goal of the process is to achieve product-market fit as quickly as possible. Dan Olsen (2015) explains about The Lean Product Process that it describes into six steps, there are:
?"Lean Product Development Process"
From the book: The Lean Product Playbook (Dan Olsen, 2015)
- Determine target customers
Different customer will have different needs, and even those are having same needs, but at the end they can have distinct views on their importance things. Matching a product with its target customer is like fishing. We start define target customer by capturing all of relevant customer attribute that identify our customer is being our target market. Dividing a broad market into specific subsets based on attribute is called market segmentation. These attributes can be:
- Demographic segmentation is a group of people, such as: age, gender, martial status, income, and education level.
- Psychographic classify a group of people according to psychological variable such as: attitudes, opinion, values, and interests.
- Behavioural segmentation is to describe target customer: whether or not someone take a particular action or how frequently he/she does.
- Based on needs segmentation divided market into customer segments that each have distinct needs.
2. Identify undeserved customer needs
The goal is to build and validate of problem space before set out to design a solution. It should focus on identifying what customers needs that product could satisfy. Identify needs is sounding like customer benefits (product features). A benefit conveys value, which means, it’s doing something for the customer. Finally, many of benefits speak to increasing something that’s desired or decreased something that isn’t desired.
3. Define value proposition
It identifies the specific customer needs that product will address and articulates how it is better and different than alternatives. It’s important to list the must-haves, since they are required. Table on the right side is a blank template for determines our value proposition. Competitors don’t just mean direct competitors, there should be alternative solutions to our product that same customers needs. For must-haves should be “Yesâ€. For performance benefits, we can use the value for higher precision. Delighters are typically unique, so it just lists each delighter on separate row and then mark “Yes†where applicable.
4. Specify Minimum Viable Product (MVP) feature set
We identify the minimum functionality required to validate that we are heading in the right direction. It called MVP candidate instead of an MVP because it is based on hypotheses. For each benefit in product value preposition, we need to come up with as many feature ideas as we can for how our product could deliver that benefit. We need great thinking in the problem space and now transitioning to solution space. At this point, brainstorming rules should apply divergent thinking. Divergent thinking means trying to generates as many ideas as possible without any judgments or evaluation. At the end, we break each of them down into smaller pieces of functionality. The goal is to find ways to reduce scope and build only the most valuable pieces of each feature.
5. Create MVP prototype
The type of prototype depends on the type of test want to conduct with end user or customers. The output could be: hand sketches, wireframes, mockups, or iterative prototype.
6. Test MVP with customers
In this stage, focus on how to conduct qualitative user testing of MVP. Quantitative test, such as: A/B tests, landing page test, end use need test, etc. User feedback is incredibly valuable because it identifies about what team don’t know. User testing validates or invalidates hypotheses, whether it made it explicitly or implicit assumptions. When doing qualitative user tests, we need to show product or design deliverables to the customers/end users.