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I'm mentoring a former colleague who wants to improve her product management expertise and skills. She's in the very early planning stages at her company on a new product concept. I'd like to give her some great information on the process to take an idea all the way through product development and launch.

Has anyone seen anything that might help? She's a wonderful person and it would be really nice to help her.

Tx!

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3 Answers

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If the product is in the online space I'd recommend all of these:

  • Lean Startup by Eric Reis - philosophical overview with some practical tips on how to approach getting product/market fit

  • The Startup Owners Manual by Steve Blank - the most up to date book on Customer Development (his earlier book Four Steps to the Epiphany is the original book on the Customer Development process. Still worth a read.)

  • Running Lean by Ash Maurya - a very practical guide to applying Lean Startup principles to web startups

  • The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits - the subtitle "A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany" is pretty accurate.

I'd also stick these three on pre-order (I have ;-)

  • The Lean Product Book by Janice Fraser
  • UX for Lean Startups by Laura Klein
  • Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf with Josh Seiden

Janice, Laura, Jeff & Josh are all really good at their stuff and have done some excellent work with startups and product development. Janice's book in particular is I think going to be very good since it talks more about startups in particular.

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While I would recommend Eric Reis book his site itself while a sales outlet for his book is packed with information and processes theleanstartup.com – Tim Nash Jan 26 at 12:57
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I am currently reading "The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company" (link: http://www.amazon.com/The-Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-By-Step/dp/0984999302 ), that is really helpful and recommended. It was published in March 2012; so it's pretty current info.

The really nice thing about it is in the Kindle version you can get a version of the book that is specific for Web/Mobile development, or one that is specific to physical (product) development. These two channels are mixed in the printed version.

Update: Feb 5, I came across this free online web course on the lean startup that has a bunch of 15 minute chats from startups. One of them is from Steve Blank, who gives a really great overview of the book I've mentioned above. There is lots of other great information in the course, and I'd recommend it with the book itself. Link: http://www.udemy.com/lean-startup-sxsw-2012-videos-and-presentations/

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up vote 1 down vote

Our company is now out the other end of the product develop phase, although we are still learning and trying out new things daily. I have written down quite a lot of my findings and tips in Running a software company last week. Hope this of some use and would love to know what eveyone else's findings are!

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