The lean product lifecycle, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of The Lean Product Lifecycle: A playbook for making products people want, published by Pearson, priced £11.74.  Co-authored by Craig Strong, Tendayi Viki, Sonja Kresojevic.

IDEA – EXPLORE – VALIDATE – GROW – SUSTAIN – RETIRE

And discover how to develop products according to their life stage and ensure the right investment for each is assigned. There is a step-by-step guide of product development best practices using examples and case studies from several companies and start-ups.

Using the tools and templates in this book, you’ll be able to:

Take a new product from idea to scale within a market.

Understand the difference between executing on products that are already successful in the market and searching for profitable business models for new products.

Use the right tools and methods for validating new products ideas and business models.

Understand how to manage mature products and retire old products using lean innovation principles.

Eric Ries’s break through book The Lean Startup still casts a large shadow over many other books that have followed. The challenge for any new book is to offer new insights and lessons of value for its readers. At the end of each chapter in this book there are useful and actionable worksheet templates to help you really progress your idea into a viable product. The book also treads a readable line between theory and specific insights, based on case studies and interviews with people at the bleeding edge of using these techniques. The interviews work well and perform a useful counterpoint to the ideas expressed in each chapter.

Overall if you are planning to successfully embrace lean startup principles then you need to be following through and actually getting out of the building, talking to clients, finding out what people really want. Therefore a book like this must always only be a complementary tool to the real work of testing, validating, building MVPs and moving quickly to find out fast if you are on the right path or not. If you are going to succeed then you probably need to make a book like this dog-eared, well thumbed, and on your work bench and referred to on a daily basis. Fortunately too, there are so many ways to capture data now that you should be able to assess effectively what is working. By the end of this book it grew on us, and we would reccomend it if you are looking to follow this type of working practices.

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