I recently finished reading The Lean Startup – How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses – by Eric Ries. This book has been in my to-read list for quite some time, and has been recommended to me by several friends over the past few years. I am very glad that I was finally able to read this gem in entrepreneurship and management.
Below are key excerpts from the book that I found to be particularly insightful:
After more than ten years as an entrepreneur, I came to reject that line of thinking. I have learned from both my own successes and failures and those of many others that it’s the boring stuff hat matters the most. Startup success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught. Entrepreneurship is a kind of management. No, you didn’t read that wrong. We have wildly divergent associations with these two words, entrepreneurship and management.
This is a book for entrepreneurs and the people who hold them accountable. The five principles of the Lean Startup, which inform all three parts of this book, are as follows: 1. Entrepreneurs are everywhere. 2. Entrepreneurship is management. 3. Validated learning. 4. Build-Measure-Learn. 5. Innovation accounting.
The Lean Startup method, in contrast, is designed to teach you how to drive a startup. Instead of making complex plans that are based on a lot of assumptions, you can make constant adjustments with a steering wheel called the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. Through this process of steering, we can learn when and if it’s time to make a sharp turn called a pivot or whether we should persevere along our current path. Once we have an engine that’s revved up, the Lean Startup offers methods to scale and grow the business with maximum acceleration.
Mark explained, “Traditionally, the product manager says, ‘I just want this.’ In response, the engineer says, ‘I’m going to build it.’ Instead, I try to push my team to first answer four questions: 1. Do consumers recognize that they have the problem you are trying to solve? 2. If there was a solution, would they buy it? 3. Would they buy it from us? 4. Can we build a solution for that problem?”
What differentiates the success stories from the failures is that the successful entrepreneurs had the foresight, the ability, and the tools to discover which parts of their plans were working brilliantly and which were misguided, and adapt their strategies accordingly.
Thus, for startups, I believe in the following quality principle: If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.
These examples from Grockit demonstrate each of the three A’s of metrics: actionable, accessible, and auditable.
My goal in advocating a scientific approach to the creation of startups is to channel human creativity into its most productive form, and there is no bigger destroyer of creative potential than the misguided decision to persevere. Companies that cannot bring themselves to pivot to a new direction on the basis of feedback from the marketplace can get stuck in the land of the living dead, neither growing enough nor dying, consuming resources and commitment from employees and other stakeholders but not moving ahead.
For the Five Whys to work properly, there are rules that must be followed. For example, the Five Whys requires an environment of mutual trust and empowerment. In situations in which this is lacking, the complexity of Five Whys can be overwhelming. In such situations, I’ve often used a simplified version that still allows teams to focus on analyzing root causes while developing the muscles they’ll need later to tackle the full-blown method. I ask teams to adopt these simple rules: L Be tolerant of all mistakes the first time. 2. Never allow the same mistake to be made twice.
I highly recommend this book!
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