Eric Ries delivers an extremely engaging overview of how any business of any size can apply the principles of a lean start up. Starting with a new form of management geared towards handling ‘extreme uncertainty’ to build a sustainable business from innovative new ideas.
The Lean Startup method builds capital-efficient companies because it allows startups to recognise that it’s time to pivot sooner, creating less waste of time and money. Although we write the feedback loop as Build-Measure-Learn because the activities happen in that order, our planning really works in the reverse order. We figure out what we need to learn, use innovation accounting to figure out what we need to measure to know if we are gaining validated learning, and then figure out what product we need to build to run that experiment and get the measurement.
Laced with examples from Eric’s own experiences, successes and failures as well as those of others to help give a healthy reality to the points being made.
Although there were many insights for me throughout, here are a few that float to the top for the time being:
This is one of the core principles that underlies the Toyota Production System and translates to 'go and see for yourself'. It pertains to having deep first hand knowledge of a user pain point so as to be able to better design solutions to them.
Despite finding I'm a ‘learn by doing’ type of person, especially when it comes to being a designer; I simply don’t do this nearly as much as I should do. I know personally I need to experience something to have a deep understanding of it. This goes a long way into grasping the user pain succinctly when solving problems and finding solutions for my design work.
Although this can be difficult in more technical areas it is certainly worth the effort.
I found Chapter 6: Test made me think of the shortcomings of my own design process. In particular, I like to test slightly more polished prototypes even in low fidelity. I design out far more user flows than needed to test an initial idea; resulting in a longer lead time for a prototype.
We must be willing to set aside our traditional professional standards to start the process of validated learning as quickly as possible.
I can certainly improve on this time to value. Currently I am creating quickly sketched user flows in procreate then walking through them in a screen recording to communicate ideas with end users faster.
The core idea of this is to tie investments to directly to the prevention of the most problematic symptoms. The idea is to try and ascertain a root cause of something that has gone wrong of pain.
At the root of every seemingly technical problem is a human problem.
Although I have seen this method before I have not seen it so well illustrated with concrete examples. I felt the way it was explained in the book enabled me to understand the impact of using it in a more streamlined fashion and how I can apply it in my own design work when investigating user pain.
I am guilty much of the time of bloating an experience unnecessarily because I am not only trying to think of all the potential things a user would want but further incorporate a wealth of feedback resulting in a user experience that goes well beyond solving the original pain.
For me this ties in closely with managing feedback form different stakeholders. To achieve the right business outcome we won’t need a bloated user experience but could deliver a much smaller solution and measure it’s impact.
By building an MVP and working in smaller batches it will be easier to measure the impact of the initial idea and validate is other feedback was needed by our users. This has overlap with an engineering concept a colleague of mine recently introduced me to called ‘Yagni’. “You aint’ gonna need it”.
Remember that the rationale for building low quality MVPs is that developing any features beyond what early adopters require is a form of waste.
I would recommend this book to all product designers working on large complex problems that can oftentimes seem overwhelming. This booked helped me to see how I could improve my own design practice to contribute more meaningfully to the business as a whole.
I also gained an appreciation that design goals and metrics should be aligned with the business outcomes so as to succeed in delivering sustainable business growth which is a team sport. after all...
“Good design is good business” - Thomas J Watson Jr