Dan Olsen

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About Dan Olsen
Dan Olsen is a product management trainer, consultant, speaker, and author. At Olsen Solutions, he works with CEOs and product leaders to help them build great products and 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 products. His clients include Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber, Walmart, Box, eBay, Medallia, and One Medical Group.
Prior to consulting, Dan was a product leader at Intuit and at several startups.
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 the Lean Startup movement.
Dan is a regular keynote speaker at major product management, tech, design, and agile conferences. You can see his upcoming speaking events and view his previous talks at https://dan-olsen.com/speaking/.
Dan lives in Silicon Valley, where he founded the Lean Product Meetup, a monthly speaker series with over 10,000 members: https://meetup.com/lean-product.
Dan is the author of The Lean Product Playbook, one of the most popular product management books that teaches you how to create products that customers love. Learn more at https://leanproductplaybook.com.
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Blog postI am very excited to announce my second Lean Product Management Workshop of 2022 May 10-12 from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM PT. With covid, I have adapted my workshops to be online.
This workshop is spread out across 3 consecutive days. Each session is 3.5 to 4 hours long so that you don’t get Zoom fatigue and so you can take care of your work. Plus, this schedule promotes better absorption of the material and gives attendees time to reflect between sessions.
I’ll be sharing product ma2 months ago Read more -
Blog postI am very excited to announce my first Lean Product Management Workshop of 2022 February 15-17 from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM PT. With covid, I have adapted my workshops to be online.
This workshop is spread out across 3 consecutive days. Each session is 3.5 to 4 hours long so that you don’t get Zoom fatigue and so you can take care of your work. Plus, this schedule promotes better absorption of the material and gives attendees time to reflect between sessions.
I’ll be sharing produc4 months ago Read more -
Blog postI am very excited to announce my next Lean Product Management workshop on November 2-4 from 9:30 AM to 1:30 PM PT. With covid, I have adapted my workshops to be online.
This workshop is spread out across 3 consecutive days. Each session is around 3.5 hours long so that you don’t get Zoom fatigue and so you can take care of your work. Plus, this schedule promotes better absorption of the material and gives attendees time to reflect between sessions.
I always make my workshops h8 months ago Read more -
Blog postI am very excited to announce my next Lean Product Management workshop on Aug 17-19. With covid, I have adapted my workshops to be online.
This workshop is spread out across 3 consecutive days. Each session is around 3.5 hours long so that you don’t get Zoom fatigue and so you can take care of your work. Plus, this schedule promotes better absorption of the material and gives attendees time to reflect between sessions.
I always make my workshops highly interactive with lots11 months ago Read more -
Blog postI am very excited to announce my next Lean Product Management workshop on May 11 – 13 (rescheduled from Apr 20-22). With covid, I have adapted my workshops to be online.
This workshop is spread out across 3 consecutive days. Each session is around 3 to 3.5 hours long so that you don’t get Zoom fatigue and so you can take care of your work. Plus, this schedule promotes better absorption of the material and gives attendees time to ref
1 year ago Read more -
Blog postI am very excited to announce my next Lean Product Management workshop on Feb 9 – 11. With covid, I have adapted my workshops to be online.
This workshop is spread out across 3 consecutive days. Each session is around 3 to 3.5 hours long so that you don’t get Zoom fatigue and so you can take care of your work. Plus, this schedule promotes better absorption of the material an
1 year ago Read more -
Blog postI am very excited to announce my next Lean Product Management workshop on Nov 9 – 12. With covid, I have adapted my workshops to be online.
Based on feedback from attendees, this workshop is 12 hours long spread out across 4 consecutive days. Each session is around 3 hours long so that you don’t get Zoom fatigue and so you can take care of your work. Plus, this schedule prom
2 years ago Read more -
Blog postHappy World Book Day!
I recently learned on Reddit that the Product Management subreddit just started a PM Book Club. In case you didn’t already know, the first rule of PM Book Club is: You DO NOT talk about PM Book Club. Just kidding
I’m excited that the PM Book Club voted to select my book The Lean Product Playbook as their first book to read and review together. I plan to do some events with them and they’ve set up a Slack channel you can join.
2 years ago Read more -
Blog postIt’s an exciting time to work in product management. Product management continues to be one of the hottest jobs. It seems like everyone wants to become a product manager these days (even some of our developer and designer friends).
If you’re a product manager, you know how rewarding the job can be – and how challenging. To stay on top of your PM game, you need to invest time
3 years ago Read more -
Blog postLet’s face it: Product Management is blowing up. Listings for PM jobs are through the roof. Another indicator is the number product management conferences and events, which I like to track. When I write my annual article listing the top product events, the list grows every year. When I wrote my last article back in April, there were 21 product conferences on my list for 2018.
4 years ago Read more
Titles By Dan Olsen
The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a startup or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice.
The Lean Startup movement has contributed new and valuable ideas about product development and has generated lots of excitement. However, many companies have yet to successfully adopt Lean thinking. Despite their enthusiasm and familiarity with the high-level concepts, many teams run into challenges trying to adopt Lean because they feel like they lack specific guidance on what exactly they should be doing.
If you are interested in Lean Startup principles and want to apply them to develop winning products, this book is for you. This book describes the Lean Product Process: a repeatable, easy-to-follow methodology for iterating your way to product-market fit. It walks you through how to:
- Determine your target customers
- Identify underserved customer needs
- Create a winning product strategy
- Decide on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
- Design your MVP prototype
- Test your MVP with customers
- Iterate rapidly to achieve product-market fit
This book was written by entrepreneur and Lean product expert Dan Olsen whose experience spans product management, UX design, coding, analytics, and marketing across a variety of products. As a hands-on consultant, he refined and applied the advice in this book as he helped many companies improve their product process and build great products. His clients include Facebook, Box, Hightail, Epocrates, and Medallia.
Entrepreneurs, executives, product managers, designers, developers, marketers, analysts and anyone who is passionate about building great products will find The Lean Product Playbook an indispensable, hands-on resource.