Interview with Dan Olsen, Author of The Lean Product Playbook
Dan Olsen is a bestselling author, entrepreneur, speaker and a product management consultant helping tens of thousands of companies. Dan also hosts the monthly Lean Product & Lean UX meetup in Silicon Valley, where he gathers cross-functional teams to design and develop products that customers love.
In this interview, we discuss with Dan the key advice from his book The Lean Product Playbook on what makes great products, how to define your product strategy — and how his journey led him to become a guru in Product Management.
What brought you to Product Management in the first place?
My parents bought me computer when I was 10, so I was very comfortable with coding since I was a kid. I studied Electrical Engineering in college and then I worked on submarine design. It was a great job and required a lot of cross-functional collaboration, working on complex products, complex designs. After 5 years of that work, I knew that I wanted to leverage my technical background and learn more about the business side of things. That’s what brought me to Stanford Business School in Silicon Valley and that’s where I first learned that there was this great job called Product Management: working with developers and technical people to help build the product, but also working with customers and trying to figure out what we should be building.
How did you learn Product Management?
I joke with my business school classmates, ‘Hey, remember that Product Management class we took?’ (laughing). Because there wasn’t a PM class, you couldn’t get a major in it. I asked where the best place to learn product management was, and everybody told me that Intuit is the best. So I interviewed, joined as a product manager, and walked into a great team and a great company. It was definitely a great working experience. Besides learning product management, I learned about market research, UX design, product development, and marketing. Since then I’ve worked my entire career in product management. Shortly after starting at Intuit, I I realized how important UX design is and I took classes in it. After working on my third web product in 2005, I also took classes on web programming languages.
Product development is a team sport. It takes a lot of people to build a successful product (product managers, designers, developers, etc.). PM is the hub in the middle
What is Product Management and how can you define it?
When I worked in the Intuit, I interviewed a lot of product management candidates. They asked me this question a lot. The summary I would give is: my job is to maximize the return on investment of the development resources. That is it in a nutshell. A good PM should understand how to create the most value for the customers.
Can you define 5 qualities that make a great PM?
- Customer centric. Your job is to translate customer requirements in list of objectives for the development team. So you basically need to put yourself into the customer’s shoes, empathize with them and be the champion for the customer inside the company. That could be tough if you are not the customer. But being able to get out of your own brain into someone else’s brain is a good skill for PMs.
- Prioritization. You receive a million product ideas from all over (from yourself, from your team, from your customers, from your executives) and you have limited resources, by definition. So it’s important for a good PM to figure out which things are the most important for his team to work on. And step one is just being able to make a call: ‘Ok, I have 20 ideas, can I decide which is the top idea we should work on first?’ Prioritization also brings decisiveness. The second step is to be able to answer the question: ‘Do I have a good rationale for why I put them in this or that order?’ I am a big believer in a rank order prioritization. I think a really good PM should be able to explain to other people why he/she believes this or that should be number one.
- Related to that you have to be flexible in light of new information. There is a lot of uncertainty when you are building a new product or a new feature. As a PM, you are constantly receiving lots of feedback and new information. So you have to be decisive, but also flexible in changing your mind. There is a good expression that conveys this: ‘strong opinions held loosely.’
- Being able to connect the big picture with the tactical details. Some people are very good at details, but they are focused more on the trees and less on the forest. Other people are really good at high level strategy, but they are not really good at tactical execution. A really good PM is able to bridge from ‘Ok, I understand the big picture reason why we are doing that for the company’ and translate it down to: ‘What does that mean for what my team is doing for this sprint?’ They are able to connect the dots. I call this skill dynamic range. Strong PMs have a wide dynamic range.
- The last skill is communication. Product development is a team sport. It takes a lot of people to build a successful product (product managers, designers, developers, etc.). PM is the hub in the middle: they are talking to customers, talking to executives, talking to sales. Your job is to be a translator and to make sure that each person understands the context and information they need to do their job effectively.
What are the difference between being a PM in a startup vs a PM in a big company?
I have worked at both. In general, not only PM, but any functional role in a big company tends to get more specific and chopped up (because there’re so many people). So the scope of your responsibility is often better defined, but smaller.
In a startup, your role is usually less defined. You have to wear a lot of hats, as we say. As a result, the scope of your responsibility tends to be higher, as does your degree of autonomy.
Large companies tend to have more resources, whereas in startup you may have only limited resources. But sometimes that can be a plus. Startups tend to realize that they are bleeding cash and are going to run out of money. So there is usually time pressure that tend to bias towards action. In big companies you may have to spend a larger amount of time advocating and making a business case for why should you be given the resources and why we should do what you want to do.
You are doing a lot of things in your professional career. You work as a product management consultant to CEOs and product leaders, you give talks all around the world. And you also wrote a book, The Lean Product Management. What is it all about and why should we read it?
I wrote The Lean Product Playbook, which was published by Wiley in 2015. There is a hardcover version, there is an e-book, there is an audiobook as well. The Chinese and Turkish versions have just come out. There is also a version for the Indian market. The Polish and Thai versions will be coming soon. So I am really excited that the book has received such a favorable response.
The book directly emerged from my work experience and from my talks and it is a general set of principles if you want to achieve product-market fit. In 2007, I started giving talks and sharing my best practices. And as I would talk to groups of product managers, they would ask me questions, ‘That’s great! But what about this?’ So over time, I kept adding new content, new slides, new frameworks and new talks. After a while, I realized that to achieve product-market fit, there is a certain set of conditions that need to hold true, regardless of what space you are in. The Product-Market Fit Pyramid, which is the core part of the book, describes that. From there, I created a six step Lean Product process, that guides you through an iterative approach from your initial product idea through validating it with customers.
This book is aimed to be pragmatic. A lot of times you listen to a talk or you read a book that gets you excited. But when you get back to the office you run into challenges trying to apply those principles. In my book it says ‘do this, do this, do this.’ There is an order to follow. I also wanted it to be the most comprehensive book on product management. It’s 335 pages long, it has over 50 figures and tables, and it basically covers not only how to define your idea, but how to design it, test it, build it, and optimize it. A lot of my readers tell me that they keep it at their desk so that they can pull it out and refer back to a specific chapter when they’re working on that particular thing.
Who should read The Lean Product Playbook?
It’s really for anybody building products, the sweet spot is obviously PMs. Many designers and developers have found it valuable, too. I just gave a private workshop at a company for a group of over 100 PMs, developers, and designers. And several of them told me afterwards, ‘this gives us a common language and common frameworks that we can use to improve how we define and build products.’ The book is for both individual contributors and managers/leaders. It’s really for anybody building new products, building new features, or focused on innovation.
Less than 5% of product teams actually define their Value Proposition. Everyone is just too busy focused on the day-to-day that no one has time to take a step back and think longer term.
All ideas and product are different. Do you think you’ve come up with a general set of rules that apply to all of them?
Yes, it is a general set of principles to achieve product-market fit. There is a customer you are trying to create value for and they have needs. That is the market: a set of people that share a set of common needs. The key thing is your value proposition: how your product is going to meet needs in a way that is better than another product. And then the next step is to define the functionality. And after that is determining the user experience. Many of the examples in the book relate to software products, but I believe the advice applies to all products.
In your Product-Market Fit Pyramid you mention 5 layers and 6 steps in the process. What layer is the most important? And which one is most omitted by the PMs?
That’s an interesting questions. Because it is a pyramid, each layer builds on the layers beneath it. If I had to pick the most important part, it would be the Value Proposition. Because it brings together what benefits you’re going to deliver to the customers and how your product will outperform other products.’ That is the essence of product-market fit, so that you don’t launch an inferior product or a “me too” product.
Defining your value proposition also makes you think about your product strategy. In my experience, I would say less than 5% of product teams actually go through an exercise like that. Everyone is just too busy focused on the day-to-day that no one has time to take a step back and think longer term.
Another mistake I see product teams make is related to another idea I cover in the book: problem space and solution space. So many teams just jump in and start building something, or start designing something without considering the problem space: ‘Who is this product for?’ and ‘What is this product supposed to do for them?’
What are the works that support your book?
In The Lean Product Playbook, I reference four books that I recommend PMs read:
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
What Customers Want by Tony Ulwick
The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
And the last word. You are going to give a talk and two workshops at Productized Conference 2017. What made you decide to speak in Lisbon and what will you be bringing to the conference attendees?
I keep my eye on all the major product conferences and see how they’re doing. I’ve heard a lot of great things about Productized, and I am really excited to speak there. I am also half Spanish: I grew up in Spain, less than 400 km from Lisboa. So it will be great to visit the Iberian peninsula again. I know Lisbon is a beautiful city.
What am I going to cover? I am doing two half-day workshops, 4 hours each. The workshop is basically my book in 4 hours. I cover the Lean Product Process. My main goal is to explain the concepts and bring them to life. We do exercises with real-world case studies and have plenty of Q&A. It is like the movie version of my book.
In my keynote talk, which is much shorter than the workshop, I basically cover the key parts of the Lean Product Process.
Also, they will be selling copies of The Lean Product Playbook at Productized and I’ll be signing books there. If you already have a copy, you can bring it and I’ll be happy to sign it and answer some questions.
Don’t miss a chance to meet Dan Olsen in sunny Lisbon, October 26th-27th! Use a special discount code LEANPRODUCT to get 25% off on your order on Eventbrite page. Attend the Productized Lisbon Pre-Conference Lunch , and get a free hard cover of The Lean Product Playbook.
by Katsiaryna Drozhzha
About Productized Masterclasses
The Productized Masterclasses are 2 days of hands-on masterclasses and insightful keynote speakers. On 27 & 28 May you’ll enjoy 4 masterclasses of your choice, get practical tips, and network with your peers. Come and meet Dan Olsen, Kandis O’Brien, Radhika Dutt, Ken Sandy, or Daniel Zacarias, among many others and get ready to be inspired to learn more about Enterprise Product and Consumer Product! SAVE THE DATE — MAY 27–28 2021
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