"The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback" by Dan Olsen

is a decent start.

What do your users say and do?

Do you know about user interviews and user research? Here's a great short intro: https://www.slideshare.net/xamde/summary-of-the-mom-test

I strongly recommend learning about product management and user research. Read The Mom Test and The Lean Product Playbook and do what's relevant. Start there!

Happy to discuss more and share more resources that could help. Email in profile.

There are lots of ways to test and to map potential features to customer problems. Launching features because _you_ think they’ll resonate with users is a complete crapshoot. More often than not, people inside the company are way too close to the product to be able to determine which features are the right ones. I recommend “The Right It” by Alberto Savoia, “What Customers Want” by Tony Ulwick, and “The Lean Product Playbook” by Dan Olsen if Cutler’s essay doesn’t convince you.

Start with Steve Blank’s The Startup Manual or Four Step to Epiphany. Other books

Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook

Mart Cagan, Inspired

Ryan Singer, Shape Up

Jake Knapp, Sprint

Jeff Patton, User Story Mapping

Stephen Wunker, Costovation

I would recommend that you read a book a week, every week, for the rest of your life. :)

Just start with the ones in the article and Amazon/Kindle will get good at recommending books.

Here's some books recently read on my Kindle:

  - No Rules Rules
  - Never Split The Difference
  - The Manager's Path
  - The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
  - Ultralearning
  - The Hard Thing About Hard Things
  - What You Do is Who You Are
  - User Story Mapping
  - Inspired
  - The Lean Product Playbook
  - Competing Against Luck
  - Domain Driven Design
  - Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
  - Data-Driven Marketing
  - Designing Data-Intensive Applications
  - Monetizing Innovation
  - Super Thinking
  - The Great Mental Models
  - Nonviolent Communication
  - High Growth Handbook
  - Powerful
  - Trillion Dollar Coach

I've had that question mulling around in my head for a few years.

Like others have mentioned, of course there's an element of luck. It helps to have a product that fits the zeitgeist.

But in my experience, the remaining 99% is all working smart and understand what and the "why" of the problem at hand.

The Google Ads technique is good, but only if you're working on a product with a known problem. For anything new... it probably won't be much help on it's own. It's useful though if you use to see how people try to solve known problems.

Best resources hands down IMO for understanding 0 to PMF are:
The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen. Gives a good view on how products fit with the market. If the problem space is wobbly, the solution space will suck.
The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick (my favourite). Excellent book on user interviews. It's so good that I made a primer out of it: https://gum.co/DeSxL
The PMF Engine by the founder of Superhuman: https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine...
It's a more quantifiable way of approaching it.

For a dating/social app what matters to users is the pool of other users. Are there enough users, etc.? and the answer is no (at this point).

I will look into the sources you shared. I have heard of The Mom Test and The Lean Product Playbook but haven't still had a chance to check them out. Will definitely do.

Thanks for the offer also. Will get in touch.

I’m 37 and have recently started a role as head of product.

Although my background is in design, I’ve spent the last 15 years variously doing design, ux and web development. I got into it as the previous person left suddenly and I sort of took over and was doing it a while before it was made official.

Product management is a mix of ux, development and business, so it helps to have an interest and understanding of these things.

For me the biggest change has been going from solving problems to finding and articulating the problems for the team to solve. I’ve had to hold myself back from getting stuck in to finding answers so that I allow the team autonomy and also don’t accidentally short circuit the process.

The LEAN Startup is worth reading, as is Designing Products People Love by Scott Hurff, and The LEAN Product Playbook. Strategise by Roman Pilcher has some good stuff on business strategy and innovation theory. I signed up to a free trial with Safari Books Online and read everything I could in the time. Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning has some good videos too.

A list of books I posted in another thread:

* Start with Steve Blank’s The Startup Manual or Four Step to Epiphany. Other books:

* Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook

* Mart Cagan, Inspired

* Ryan Singer, Shape Up

* Jake Knapp, Sprint

* Jeff Patton, User Story Mapping

* Stephen Wunker, Costovation

Also checkout /r/productmanagement subreddit.

A list of books I posted in another thread:

* Steve Blank’s The Startup Manual or Four Step to Epiphany.

* Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook

* Ryan Singer, Shape Up

* Jake Knapp, Sprint

* Jeff Patton, User Story Mapping

* Stephen Wunker, Costovation

* Jackie Bavaro, Cracking the PM Career

Also checkout /r/productmanagement subreddit.