How to Prioritize Opportunities

We all know that most new product initiatives fail. A big reason why is that the team was focused on the solution they were building and weren’t as clear on the customer problem they were solving. In this talk, Dan Olsen will share advice from his bestselling product book The Lean Product Playbook on how to understand and define customer problems before you start building.

Once you have a well-defined problem space, the next question is: How do we prioritize the different opportunities we could pursue? To answer this question, Dan will share his powerful but easy-to-use Importance vs. Satisfaction framework, which will help your team prioritize the opportunities that will create the most value for your customers. Dan will illustrate his frameworks with real-world examples and case studies. Come learn how to increase your odds of product success.

OUR SPECIAL GUEST

Dan Olsen

Dan Olsen is a product management trainer, consultant, author, and speaker. At Olsen Solutions, he works with CEOs and product leaders to help them build strong product teams.

Dan has worked with a range of businesses, from small, early-stage startups to large public companies, on a wide variety of web and mobile products. His clients include Google, Walmart, Amazon, Facebook, Box, Microsoft, Medallia, and One Medical Group.

Prior to consulting, Dan worked at Intuit, where he led the Quicken product team to record sales and profit. After Intuit, he was a product leader of several startups. Dan began his career designing nuclear-powered submarines.

Dan earned a BS in electrical engineering from Northwestern and an MBA from Stanford. He also earned a master’s degree in industrial engineering from Virginia Tech, where he studied the Lean manufacturing principles that inspired Lean Startup.

Dan wrote the bestseller The Lean Product Playbook, published by Wiley. He lives in Silicon Valley, where he hosts the monthly Lean Product & Lean UX Meetup. A frequent speaker at business and tech events, Dan enjoys sharing ideas and comparing notes with as many people as he can. He also teaches public and private workshops.