Should be required reading not only for the entrepreneurs I work with, but for my friends and colleagues in various industries who have inevitably struggled with many of the challenges The Lean Startup addresses." This book is a guided tour of the most important innovative practices used at Google, Toyota and Facebook that work in any business.”
LEAN STARTUP
At the time, it seemed like we were doing everything right: we had a great product, a brilliant team, great technology and the right idea at the right time. Startup success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time.
This thinking evolved into Lean Startup: the application of lean thinking to the innovation process. Pretty quickly I realized it was time to focus on the Lean Startup movement full time.
VISION
START
The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible. The Lean Startup method, on the other hand, is designed to teach you how to start startups.
DEFINE
He needs the principles of Lean Startup as much as the people I thought of as classic entrepreneurs do. We often lose sight of the fact that a startup is not just about a product, a technological breakthrough or even a brilliant idea.
LEARN
The three major networks controlled more than 80 percent of total usage and were in the process of consolidating their market share gains at the expense of a number of smaller players.2 The conventional wisdom was that it was more or less impossible. to bring a new IM network to market without spending a tremendous amount of money on marketing. Personally, I was worried that the low quality of the product would tarnish my reputation as an engineer.
STEER
This Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop is at the heart of the Lean Startup model. Instead, we should focus our energy on reducing the total time through this feedback loop. We'll walk through a complete loop of the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop, discussing each of the.
To apply the scientific method to a startup, we need to determine which hypotheses to test. The MVP is that version of the product that enables a complete pivot to the Build-Measure-Learn cycle with minimal effort and development time. We also need to bring it to the attention of potential customers to gauge their reactions.
We may even have to try and sell them a prototype, as we'll soon see. After completing the Build-Measure-Learn loop, we are faced with the most difficult question that every entrepreneur faces: whether to change the original strategy or to persist. All the techniques in the second part are designed to minimize the total time through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop.
LEAP
These two hypotheses represent two of the most important questions every new startup faces. At Toyota this is called the Japanese term genchi gembutsu, one of the most important expressions in the vocabulary of lean manufacturing. They accept – and even prefer – an 80 percent solution; you don't need a perfect solution to pique their interest.4.
As one manager recently told me, "I know for me, MVP feels a little risky—in a good way—since I've always been a perfectionist." An obvious assumption, then, of the business model is that customers will sign up for a free trial once they have one. We actually raised our seed and Series A round before the system was automated—the assumption was that the lines between humans and AI would be blurred, and we at least proved that we were building things that humans would respond to.
One of the most vexing aspects of minimum viable product is the challenge it poses to traditional notions of quality. Edwards Deming's famous statement that the customer is the most important part of the production process. These discussions about quality assume that the company already knows which characteristics of the product the customer will perceive as valuable.
MEASURE
I was in charge of the product development team, albeit a small one in those days, and I shared with my co-founders the feeling that the problem must be with my team's efforts. Even worse, the team had no clear understanding of whether any of the changes they were making mattered to customers. To better understand the importance of good metrics, let's look at a company called Grockit.
There was just one problem: they weren't seeing enough growth in customer use of the product. After all, this was part of the big deal with agile development: engineers agree to adapt the product to the company's ever-changing requirements, but are not responsible for the quality of these. They were confident about this feature because lazy registration is considered one of the best design methods for online services.
These examples from Grockit demonstrate each of the three As of metrics: executable, accessible, and auditable. In the IMVU example, we saw four behaviors: downloading the product, signing up for the product from one's computer, chatting with other customers, and upgrading to the paid version of the product. It doesn't make the cut in terms of the big story because it's too boring.
PIVOT (OR PERSEVERE)
In Silicon Valley, we call this experience being stuck in the land of the living dead. Consider the customer comments above: customers like the concept, they like the selector. In this pivot, David did what I call a customer segment pivot, keeping the functionality of the product the same but changing the focus of the target audience.
Worse, the product that remained was classified as a legacy product, one that was no longer suitable for the goals of the company. This is particularly damaging to the decision to pivot because it robs teams of the belief that it is necessary to change. For members of the tech press (and many early adopters of technology) this "artificial" limit on the number of connections was anathema.
The product development team must bring a full report of the results of their product optimization efforts over time (not just the most recent period) as well as a comparison of how those results compare to expectations (again, over time). It was recently named one of Fast Company's ten most innovative companies in finance.4 The company. continues to operate with agility, scaling according to the growth principles outlined in Chapter 12. Many of the works in this category are long on exhortations and short on details.
ACCELERATE
In part three, we will develop techniques that enable Lean Startups to grow without sacrificing the speed and agility that are the lifeblood of any startup. Contrary to popular belief, dullness and bureaucracy are not the inevitable fate of companies as they reach maturity. I believe that with the right foundation, Lean Startups can grow to become lean companies that maintain their agility, learning orientation and culture of innovation even as they scale.
In Chapter 9, we'll see how Lean Startups take advantage of the counterintuitive power of small batches. Just as lean manufacturing has taken a just-in-time approach to building products, reducing the need for inventory during the process, Lean Startups apply just-in-time scalability and run product experiments without huge upfront investments to do in planning and planning. design. We'll see how techniques from the lean manufacturing toolkit, such as the Five Whys, help startup teams grow without becoming bureaucratic or dysfunctional.
We will also see how lean disciplines pave the way for a startup to transition into an established company driven by operational excellence. In fact, we will see that an advantage of a successful startup's rapid growth is that the company can retain its entrepreneurial DNA even as it matures. I've included an epilogue called "Waste Not" in which I consider some of the broader implications of the success of the Lean Startup movement, place them in historical context (including cautionary lessons from past movements), and make suggestions.
BATCH
In a bulk approach, you would have to empty all the envelopes, get new ones, and refill them. With a small batch approach, this would be identified immediately and no rework would be required. In the post-World War II economy, Japanese automakers like Toyota could not compete with the huge American factories that used the latest mass production techniques.
Moreover, in the war-ravaged Japanese economy, no capital was available for massive investments in large machines. However, the process used to design the product is stuck in the era of mass production. Behind the scenes, during the development and design of the product itself, large batches are still the rule.
In fact, in total, IMVU makes about fifty changes to its product (on average) every day. At IMVU, we call this continuous deployment, and even in the fast-moving world of software development, it's still considered controversial.3 As the Lean Startup movement has gained traction, it's been embraced by more and more many startups, even those operating mission-critical applications. But more and more industries are seeing their design process accelerated by the same fundamental forces that make this kind of rapid iteration possible in the software industry.