The Customer-Driven Playbook: Converting Customer Feedback Into Successful Products

by Travis Lowdermilk

Despite the wide acceptance of Lean approaches and customer-development strategies, many product teams still have difficulty putting these principles into meaningful action. That's where The Customer-Driven Playbook comes in. This practical guide provides a complete end-to-end process that will help you understand customers, identify their problems, conceptualize new ideas, and create fantastic products they'll love.

To build successful products, you need to continually test your assumptions about your customers and the products you build. This book shows team leads, researchers, designers, and managers how to use the Hypothesis Progression Framework (HPF) to formulate, experiment with, and make sense of critical customer and product assumptions at every stage. With helpful tips, real-world examples, and complete guides, you'll quickly learn how to turn Lean theory into action.


Collect and formulate your assumptions into hypotheses that can be tested to unlock meaningful insights
Conduct experiments to create a continual cadence of learning
Derive patterns and meaning from the feedback you've collected from customers
Improve your confidence when making strategic business and product decisions
Track the progression of your assumptions, hypotheses, early ideas, concepts, and product features with step-by-step playbooks
Improve customer satisfaction by creating a consistent feedback loop

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Design

254 pages, ebook

Published June 20, 2017

Reviews

[Irina Smoke · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the core of this book is the idea that building successful products means continuously testing your assumptions. It's a clear, practical guide on exactly how to do exactly that at all stages of customer or product development using what the authors call the Hypothesis Progression Framework, or HPF.

It's very well written - the "why" and "how" are concisely laid out and connected to stories of teams that have successfully applied the framework. The concepts in this book are built on Lean principles, which makes it easy to grasp for PMs, developers, and others that might already be familiar with them. UXers will appreciate familiar methods packaged into a broader, comprehensive strategy and language for getting your whole org on board with being customer-driven. Highly recommended to anyone looking to test their assumptions and ensure they're building products that solve real problems.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lowerdermilk and Rich introduce a very practical methodology for articulating assumptions and hypotheses in a way that invites experimentation and structured sense-making - the Hypothesis Progression Framework, HPF.

This book definitely helped me cut through ambiguity. As a Microsoft PM intern, this book was a helpful companion when setting up my customer interviews and making sense of my learnings as I progressed from the customer discovery to usability testing phases. The recommended interview questions saved me a ton of time too; I just had to tweak some questions to arrive at specific insights.

I'd recommend this to all Microsoft PM interns - you can access it for free on the O'Reilly portal! Moreover, just learning how to articulate your assumptions/hypotheses with structure and clarity is a key takeaway that will help you at any company.

[Greg Burrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

An excellent step-by-step guide for learning how to build products that meet your customers' needs. Its not so much a "why" but rather a "how-to" book. The authors present a hypothesis-driven methodology that employs experiments and iteration. This stands in contrast to other approaches such as building personas which, while a useful tool, will leave you always wondering how well your personas match your customers (and often finding out too late that they don't). Even if you don't follow this guide faithfully you will benefit from this book by reconsidering just how you go about learning what your customers need. I do wish this book had presented some actual case studies of this methodology in action (in addition to the hypothetical example used throughout).

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very practical on how to build a solid customer-centric product culture in your organization. The playbooks in the second half of the book contain a lot of actionable information including step-by-step instructions and list of questions you can reuse. A great book, overall.

[Nadya Tsech · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overview of popular design methods with step by step instructions how to conduct them.

[Villars Gimm · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a playbook it is a great companion as part of product development. I did miss some more details on why interviews techniques should be performed.

[Gerald Maier-Köck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Das HPF (Hypothesis-Progression-Framework) ist sensationell! Sehr strukturiert aufgebauter Weg, mit Kunden-getriebener Research Produkte bzw. Produkt-Features zu identifizieren. WOW!

[Rafael Cruz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed feelings about this book

This book has parts really good but also some that are bad articulated. When bought this book, I had great expectations, and the first chapters are good. The book is a combination of Kano model and qualitative research techniques, so it doesn’t present something really new. It’s an application of these tools and model. The last 3 chapters are boring and repetitive, must be rewritten The book is not bad but for the content and value that delivers is definitively OVER PRICED. I am trying to be as objective as possible, I do hold also a PhD and also have more than 20 years experience in product development.

[Cesar Martinez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pragmatic and helpfull view to understand customers through hypothesis

Pragmatic and easy to follow process to define critical customers centric hypothesis under their framework provided. Great toolkit, highly recommended book

[John Wargo]

Good, solid methodology for determining and building product features. I think the playbooks sections went a little long, lots and lots of repetitive information in those sections.