Book · ~336 pages

The Lean Product Playbook

Dan Olsen · Dan Olsen (dan-olsen.com) Paid Intermediate

Olsen gives you a full framework (the Product-Market Fit Pyramid) for getting to fit deliberately rather than by luck: target customer, underserved needs, value proposition, features, and UX. It is the how-to that sits underneath the survey number, especially useful if your score is low and you need a structured way to diagnose why. Practical and testable at every layer.

  • PMF is built from the problem space up, not from features down
  • Nail the target customer and their underserved needs first
  • Test each layer of the pyramid as an explicit hypothesis
Open on dan-olsen.com ↗

The question it answers

  1. How do I know if I've found product-market fit?

Read with it

  1. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  2. The essay that put 'product-market fit' into the startup vocabulary. Read it for the gut-level description of what PMF feels... pmarchive.com Essay · ~15 min read The Only Thing That Matters Marc Andreessen
  3. The nuanced counterweight: PMF isn't a single binary moment, it can be lost, and 'market' is doing more work than founders... a16z.com Article · ~20 min read 12 Things About Product-Market Fit Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)
  4. This is the essay that forces the honest question underneath your idea: are you building a growth company or a good small... Paul Graham Essay · ~20 min read Startup = Growth Paul Graham
  5. Seibel's whole point is that a market only counts once real customers are grabbing the product as fast as you can make it and... Michael Seibel (Y Combinator) Essay · ~4 min read The Real Product Market Fit Michael Seibel
  6. Video · Talk, roughly 30 minutes David Rusenko: How To Find Product Market Fit David Rusenko (Weebly co-founder)
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →