How To Create Successful Products

10 Days

Cohort-based Course

Learn how to apply best practices in product management to make your new software products and features more successful.

How To Create Successful Products

10 Days

Cohort-based Course

Learn how to apply best practices in product management to make your new software products and features more successful.

Hosted by

Dan Olsen

Author of The Lean Product Playbook. I've trained over 10,000 product people.

Dan Olsen

Author of The Lean Product Playbook. I've trained over 10,000 product people.

Course overview

Learn actionable frameworks to create real customer value

Everyone knows that most new product initiatives fail, but few people have insight into why. In my course, I will teach you a simple but powerful approach to answer the right questions as you work on your new product or feature to significantly increase your odds of success.

In this 5-session course (10 hours total), I'll teach you the best practices in product management that I've learned throughout my product career and written about in my bestselling book The Lean Product Playbook.

Who is this course for

You are a software product person responsible for creating new products or features

You are tired of your team wasting time building features that don't matter

You want to greatly increase the odds that your new product or feature will be successful

You are a software product person responsible for creating new products or features

You are tired of your team wasting time building features that don't matter

You want to greatly increase the odds that your new product or feature will be successful

What you’ll get out of this course

An actionable model for Product-Market Fit

Many product teams do not have a mental model of what it means to create real customer value. Dan will teach you the key frameworks from his book – the Product-Market Fit Pyramid and the Lean Product Process – and how to apply them to increase your odds of success.

Learn to start with problems, not solutions

One of the top reasons product initiatives fail is because the team was never clear on the customer problem they were trying to solve. Solution-first thinking is pervasive and is one of the top reasons products fail. Dan will teach you how to define your problem space.

Easily prioritize product opportunities

After you've defined your problem space, Dan will teach you his powerful but easy to use Importance vs. Satisfaction framework for how to prioritize different opportunities

Define a winning value proposition

Dan will teach you the Kano model and his Value Proposition Grid so you can create a differentiated value proposition for your product.

Make better product decisions

The easy but powerful tools you will learn in this course will help your team make better product decisions and help get everyone aligned on the same page

Meet your instructor

Dan Olsen

Dan Olsen is a product management trainer, consultant, and speaker. Dan wrote the bestselling product management book The Lean Product Playbook.

Through his talks and interactive training workshops, Dan helps companies build strong product teams. His clients include Google, Facebook, Amazon, Walmart, Uber, Nike, AT&T, HP, Cisco, and Capital One.

Dan was interim CPO during the early stages of 3 startups that grew to become unicorns: Box, One Medical Group, and Medallia. Earlier in his career, he was a product leader at Intuit and several startups.

Dan earned engineering degrees from Northwestern and Virginia Tech and an MBA from Stanford.

Dan also founded the 11,000+ member Lean Product Meetup community in 2014.

What people are saying

For those that are looking for a more structured approach to coming up with winning products, Dan combines modern techniques with experience to step you through the process.

Marty Cagan

SVPG Partner, author of Inspired and Empowered

Dan’s product expertise was incredibly helpful in building and growing Box. I found his advice incredibly valuable—and if you want to build a successful product, you will too.

Aaron Levie

CEO, Box

A great, detailed guide on how to find product-market fit and make things people will love. Dan's book should be required reading for everybody building products.

Laura Klein

Author of UX for Lean Startups and Build Better Products

Dan Olsen is an established product management black belt in Silicon Valley who gives product teams a straightforward way to achieve product-market fit.

Ken Fine

CEO, Heap

Course syllabus

Overview, Customers, and Customer Needs

We will cover an overview of the course. We will discuss the 2 key frameworks for the course: the Product-Market Fit Pyramid and the Lean Product Process. We will dive into the first step of the process: Determine Your Target Customer. We will learn about customer needs and problem space vs. solution space.

How to Prioritize Opportunities

Building on what we have learned about specifying customer needs in the problem space, we will learn how to use Importance vs. Satisfaction: an easy but powerful framework for prioritizing which opportunities will create the most customer value. We will also discuss disruptive vs. incremental innovation.

How to Define Your Value Proposition

We will learn about the Kano model as a categorization schema for customer needs. You will learn how to use the Kano model categories and Dan's Value Proposition Grid to create a differentiated product strategy.

MVP and Roadmapping

We will discuss how to use a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach to test your product ideas early. We will discuss different types of MVPs and learn the main MVP do's and don'ts. We will also expand our discussion to the broader topic of how to create product roadmaps.

How to Test and Iterate your Product

We will touch on UX design and how to test your product ideas before building them. We will discuss how to conduct user tests and how to iterate based on the feedback you receive. We will close out with an end-to-end case study.

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