Lean Startup

My favorite highlights from The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Develop an innovative product that emphasizes fast iteration and customer insight, a huge vision, and great ambition all at the same time.   

1.     Vision – Build an ideal model of disruption based on customer archetypes

1.1.    Start - Enter the build phase as quickly as possible with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This approach minimizes effort and development time required.

1.2.    Define – Humanize the customer.  Develop a customer archetype that is used daily in prioritizing decisions to ensure they are aligned with customers’ needs.

1.3.    Learn - No matter how efficiently you build something no one really wants, you are going to fail.  Validated Learning is the only type of learning that is valuable in a startup.  Learn what customers want based on empirical data from real customers.  Productivity is measured in terms of how much validated learning we are getting for our efforts.

1.4.    Experiment – Build a sustainable business around teams that perform quick experiments to provide key learning and progress the vision. Explore the value hypothesis (does this product and/or service deliver value to customers) and growth hypothesis (how will customers discover it).  Setup culture and systems so that teams can innovate at the rate of the experimentation system. 

2.     Steer – Launch an MVP to establish a baseline

2.1.    Leap – Identify tremendous opportunity and plan a strategic approach based on a well-informed strategy.  Analyze products, techniques, and the right questions to ask. 

2.2.    Test – Test all assumptions as quickly as possible.  Engage early adopters to provide valuable feedback.  Conduct A/B tests to create true results rather than a need to sell what you have.  Any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to learning should be removed from MVP.

2.3.    Measure – Rigorously measure each step of the way; quickly confront the hard truths that are revealed.  Utilize learning milestones to allow accurate and objective assessments (build model, launch MVP, iterate to get closer to ideal).  Focus on actionable and assessible measurements that are auditable.

2.4.    Pivot (or Persevere) – Getting to pivots faster is the goal during growth periods.  Having the tools and agility to find a better path is key.

3.     Accelerate – Tune the engine to get closer to the ideal

3.1.    Batch – Reduce work in progress by converting to pull methods and reducing batch size.  Figure out what needs to be learned, then work backwards to see what product will work as an experiment to get that learning.  Small batches are processed faster and ensure that issues are identified quickly. 

3.2.    Grow – New customers come from the actions of past customers.  Sources of sustainable growth power feedback loops that become engines of growth. 

3.3.    Adapt – Adaptive processes force you to slow down and invest in preventing the kinds of problems that are currently wasting time.  As these preventative efforts pay off, you naturally speed up again.

3.4.    Innovate – Create an innovation sandbox.  Nurture disruptive innovation by creating small cross-functional teams that can rapidly experiment without requiring a lot of approvals, innovate in the open, and have a personal stake in the outcome.