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Just like pretotyping, discussed last time, Lean startup was a love-child born from the ashes of entrepreneurial catastrophe. Having experienced devastating failure in his first two Startup adventures (Catalyst Recruiting and There.com), Eric Ries understandably became highly motivated to make sure that never happened to him again ... finally achieving startup glory at his third attempt, at IMVU in 2004. Having experienced both heady success and catastrophic failure at startups, Ries was well qualified to develop a methodology to help startups succeed: Lean startup. Ries was fortunate to have Steve Blank, a formidable methodologist, as his mentor at IMVU and he became Blank's star pupil. Indeed, Blank's "Customer Development" became a cornerstone of Ries' subsequent Lean Startup movement. Nowadays, Ries spends most of his time advising companies and teaching entrepreneurship. Ries' experiences are not atypical: most startups fail. Indeed, the world is crying out for a way to reduce the waste and misery associated with failed startups. Not only that, but with disruptive technologies on the rise, it's becoming more crucial than ever for established companies to innovate to survive. Lean Startup vs Pretotyping
As usual adrianh is right on the money: Lean Startup is more ambitious than pretotyping, in that it covers all aspects of running a successful business, while pretotyping just focuses on identifying the right "it" to build. Put another way, pretotyping is a subset of Lean Startup. What is Lean Startup? After defining a Startup as: A human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertaintyRies defines Lean Startup as: A set of practices for helping entrepreneurs increase their odds of building a successful startupI think the key point here is "extreme uncertainty". Ries experienced first hand that traditional business practices, such as creating a detailed business plan, simply do not work in conditions of extreme uncertainty. Steve Blank gives his take on Lean Startup as based on three principles:
In the foreword to the Lean UX book, Ries further comments: Lean Startup is a big tent. It builds on established ideas from many disciplines, from lean manufacturing to design thinking.Clearly, there are many ideas and influences behind the Lean Startup movement, and it is constantly evolving. Product Features vs Business Outcomes Laura Klein gives a practical example that further clarifies what Lean Startup is about: Before Lean UX, Company X might have said, "We need to record user comments for each product and display them on the product page". The product manager would have spent time writing a spec for comments on product pages. A designer might have come in and designed a great comment experience. Engineers would then have written code that matched the spec and the design. The whole process might have taken two or three months. At the end of the process, the product pages would allow users to leave comments. But so what? Would this make users spend more money on products? Would they stick around for longer? Would users even bother to leave comments? What is the actual benefit to the company for spending those three months? The problem with this approach is that it starts with a feature rather than a hypothesis. It assumes that comments on product pages are necessary rather than identifying a user problem, coming up with an idea that might solve that user problem, and designing a test to see if the idea is true. A more Lean approach is:
Based on our preliminary research, we believe that allowing users to leave comments on product pages will cause customers to become more engaged and buy more items. How can we figure out if that’s true? Now this has been stated in a way that allows the company to validate the hypothesis and easily change the feature if it turns out to be the wrong way to improve the metric. That is, we focus on Business Outcomes, not Product Features. Lean Startup vs Agile Mary Poppendieck provides an interesting comparison between Agile and Lean Startup:
The February Revolution In an attempt to cut through the considerable jargon and dogma from many competing methodologies, such as impact mapping, feature injection, real options, hothousing, user story mapping and similar, Gojko Adzic and others got together to try to distill the essence of these techniques into a simple set of principles. They came up with the following "february revolution". Great results happen when:
Departmental Silos
I'm interested to learn how your company is run. What works, and what doesn't, for you? Perl Monks References
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