Lean Product Management

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Here are several quotes from “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries that collectively provide a comprehensive understanding of Lean Product Management:

  1. On Defining Value and Waste: “Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste. This is a crucial concept because it means that we must understand the value we create from the perspective of our customers.”
  2. On Building the Right Product: “The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible. The Lean Startup method teaches you how to drive a startup—how to steer, when to turn, and when to persevere—and grow a business with maximum acceleration.”
  3. On Learning and Validated Learning: “Validated learning is the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a startup’s present and future business prospects. It is more concrete, accurate, and faster than market forecasting or classical business planning.”
  4. On the Build-Measure-Learn Feedback Loop: “The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop.”
  5. On Experimentation and Minimum Viable Product (MVP): “The MVP is that version of the product that enables a full turn of the Build-Measure-Learn loop with a minimum amount of effort and the least amount of development time. It lacks many features that may prove essential later on.”
  6. On Pivot or Persevere: “After we have built our MVP, our job is to start learning as much as we can. The first step is to enter the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. We build something, we measure how customers respond, and then we learn whether to pivot or persevere.”

These quotes together illustrate the principles of Lean Product Management, which involve focusing on customer value, rapid experimentation, validated learning, and iterative development to create products that meet customer needs efficiently.