Build to Sell: The Lean Secret to Crafting Irresistible Products
$28.98
Related Products
![LLC Beginner’s Guide [All-in-1]: Everything on How to Start, Run, and Grow Your First Company Without Prior Experience. Includes Essential Tax Hacks, Critical Legal Strategies, and Expert Insights](https://themodern-mama.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/71JhV13hVcL._SL1500_.jpg)
“BUILD TO SELL is a powerful exploration of lean principles applied to product creation.”
Jeff Gothelf, Author of Lean UX
“I love this book – I wish I had written it!”
Michael Ballé, Author of The Lean Strategy
THERE IS NO GREATER WASTE THAN A PRODUCT THAT DOESN’T SELL.
Are you trying to bring a new product concept to life, find Product Market Fit for your brilliant idea, scale up your company, or pivot? Then you will need a Chief Product Engineer.
Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Linus Torvalds, Coco Chanel, and Stan Lee all embody the Chief Product Engineer mindset. They are visionary leaders who combine technical expertise with strategic and financial insight.
We think genius is not a birthright and can be developed. This is why we wrote BUILD TO SELL, to combine our decades of experience in the tech industry in a colorful handbook brimming with visuals and tools that serves as a practical guide for current and future Chief Product Engineers. This book is the ideal starting point for entrepreneurs, CEOs, product, tech and data leaders, and all the ambitious innovators at heart.
We blend examples from big tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Airbnb, Netflix, Meta, Google, Salesforce, Snapchat, OpenAI, and Uber with stories from Chief Product Engineers in real-world businesses across various industries. You will meet Surya as she courageously leads the team through a new product concept that leverages legacy core tech. You’ll wonder with JB what emotions a digital insurance product can evoke. You will also discover how three CEOs manage to scale by keeping a razor-sharp focus on their product.
And you will meet my favorite mug… It’s more interesting than it seems, I promise.
We applied our product techniques to the book itself, revealed in Chapter 15. Along the way, you will find…
…How to avoid the 3 main causes of product failures
…A framework to align your product strategy with your innovation strategy
…The most important product practice to uncover a customer problem truly worth solving, free from bias
…The definitive tools to understand why customers should choose your product over your competitors’
…How to pose an enthusiastic challenge that gets buy-in from engineers and designers
…Our method for achieving emotion-centric design that dives deep into user emotions
…How performance-based product thinking helps you avoid getting trapped in feature frenzy mode
…The 5-step Design To Cost method to design for profitability from the start and avoid the cash wall trap
…A model to identify what needs to change and what doesn’t at each product iteration
…How to articulate a bold vision in a concept paper
…The Product Manifesto to communicate your bold vision and win the hearts of stakeholders and investors
Ready? Let’s make you a true Chief Product Engineer!
BUILD TO SELL is exceptionally insightful and perfectly aligned with our product philosophy. The book offers invaluable insights and practical guidance that resonate with our approach to creating compelling digital products. It’s a must-read for anyone looking to craft their product strategy.
Jonathan Widawski, Co-Founder & CEO at Maze, San Francisco
“There are many books that try to explain the success of Silicon Valley companies. Sandrine puts process, product and leaders together and shows how the combination of the three is critical. And she provides guidance for companies and founders on how to get there.”
Mark Striebeck, Co-Founder at Arta Finance, San Francisco
From the Publisher
About the authors
This book has been 10 years in the making and is the brainchild of Sandrine Olivencia. It represents 30 years of her career condensed into a 400-page book, the first in a series. Sandrine has been an executive coach for 15 years. She specializes in applying lean thinking to help startups and scale-ups grow rapidly yet respectfully. She co-authored The Lean Sensei with Michael Ballé (author of The Lean Strategy), a book on working with and developing into a lean sensei, which earned a Shingo Prize. Flavian and Caroline have worked in tech startups on leadership roles in product and engineering. Sandrine asked them to join to bring their experience and anecdotes. The three authors have partnered and built the company Taktique.
Publisher : Taktique Press
Publication date : June 24, 2024
Language : English
Print length : 420 pages
ISBN-10 : 295945040X
ISBN-13 : 978-2959450402
Item Weight : 15.3 ounces
Dimensions : 5.25 x 0.95 x 8 inches
Amazon Customer –
Put smiles on customers faces
This book is an excellent read for anyone interested in designing and making products that customers love. From market understanding, customer needs to the nitty gritty details of how to design products with better product/market fit, this book covers all the bases. Do you want to learn how to grow people to develop great products? Get this book
Susie O –
Couldnât put it down. Buying a copy of this for each of my managers
This book is dedicated to developing a customer value mindset across an organization and creating the flexibility for staff of all ranks to problem solve and innovate. Itâs seductive in the way it lays out the conundrums on how high functioning teams should work but ultimately break down in practice. Just read chapter 4 on hard-wired misconceptions about product management and youâll see what I mean. The authors generously offer concrete tools based on decades of learning that are less prescriptive and more relatable. Though written for smaller organizations in or seeking hyper-growth, the largest organizations can benefit greatly. As a director in a large financial institution strangled by its own processes, I found this book instantly relatable. I have long attempted to build a flexible, learning, and value driven team in a culture where rigid hierarchy and process reign supreme. This is the first book Iâve found that helps us accomplish that in a compelling and scaleable way with lots of guidance, examples and tools to support.
Michael Balle –
Read this and transform your company
Company = Product. We all tend to forget it as companies scale, and organizing activities and managing people takes over from our real purpose: designing and delivering products people love. Build to Sell is a must-read for any entrepreneur or startup founder.The authors remind us that a sum of features do not a product make, and that good products are, in the end, the outcome of a culture of customer satisfaction, superior technical expertise and relentless teamwork.The book provides endless insights on what is a great product and how to structure the design process to get there. The authors’ expertise and experience shine through in their clear and engaging writing style. Highly recommended!
Fabrice Bernhard –
A great translation of state-of-the-art product engineering to tech
I loved Designing the Future from Jim Morgan and Jeffrey Liker. And they even made the effort to give examples o their Lean Product Development approach not just in manufacturing but also in tech environments.But if you are in tech and donât have time to read all the books, itâs great to have the synthesis directly applicable to your context. Thatâs what Build to Sell is. Itâs the book I will recommend people in tech from now on.
esg consultants –
What you REALLY need to get right in business
A business is its product or service: it does something useful and pleasant, people buy it. It doesn’t and it needs to expand vast amounts of energy to convince people to buy it. Getting products right, particularly digital products is the make/break skill for to scale.With the shift to digital products, much of the old skills of designing a product in hand, for customer delight, have been forgotten, and engineers now somehow believe a sum of features, each more elaborate than the next, make a product.Features do not a poduct make… but its usage does. In this brilliant, clear and easy to read book the authors give us a practical guide to think about products and to organize teams so that they improve their designs and indeed, build to sell, rather than build to fail. Don’t miss this one – it’s going to be a classic.
BENJAMIN MATHIESEN –
Inspiring, practical and accessible
This book is for everyone, not just “product professionals”. As long as you are involved in designing, building, or selling something of value, you will find the advice in this book not just useful but indispensable. The authors explain the lean approach to product development using real-world anecdotes, for many types of products ranging from high-tech platforms to creative content and services. They lay out a clear roadmap to analyze the life of your customers and guarantee that the product you deliver fully satisfies their needs while engaging with their emotions to drive adoption. Most importantly, they show how to do this without falling into the common trap of “feature frenzy”, where the product team inadvertently degrades the core experience by trying to deliver too much.
Daniel –
Very helpful for all stages of brand, company, & product development
One of the very unique aspects of this book is its ability to really connect with both new entrepreneurs looking to create a project and develop a team from scratch while also being very insightful for already thriving businesses; Sandrine, Flavian, and Caroline accomplish this by refreshing and reframing the fundamentals of true entrepreneurship under the hybrid lens of practical community-building by way of the business/customer service being just as much the product as the product itself. Absolutely wonderful writing, and many examples of their conclusions that support the legitimacy of the ideas!
Alexandre Brun –
It’s rare to read about lean engineering in the tech industry and I think it needs it!It is cheap to fail and rebuild software but not cheap enough not to try hard to build best in class products first time. The book provides techniques and examples to truly understand your clients and build products they will want to buy.
Catherine Chabiron –
I agree with the authors, it is high time we challenge a few misconceptions we have, on how Agile and roadmaps always deliver great products. I find the book easy to read, because we are offered a great number of illustrations, and the point of view of different key actors.Highly recommended to help shake the dust on our delivery processes.
Amazon Customer –
At least a good book about Lean engineeering !
Nicolas S. –
Build to Sell has profoundly transformed my approach to lean engineering, guiding me to focus on problem-solving rather than mere feature addition. This book is an indispensable resource for creating impactful digital products that truly resonate with customers. I devoured it in just a few hours!
Claire VdV –
Jâavais déjà eu la chance dâassister à une formation donnée par Sandrine, alors jâattendais son dernier livre avec impatience. Ãa fait 10 ans que je fais du produit, et le Lean management a donné un nouveau souffle à mon apprentissage (et ma carrière) !