Book Review & Discussion : The Lean Startup

In this event, you’ll learn

Why you can’t manage a startup like an established company
What your value and your growth hypothesis are and why you have to test both early on
How Dropbox built an MVP and validated it with 75,000 signups (and what an MVP is)
The build, measure, learn loop you must go through again and again to succeed
What a pivot for a startup is and when one is necessary
Three different engines of growth and how many to bet on
Why you need a few core metrics and what they should be

About the Author

Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and author of the popular blog Startup Lessons Learned. He co-founded and served as CTO of IMVU, his third startup, and has had plenty of startup failures along the way. He is a frequent speaker at business events, has advised a number of startups, large companies, and venture capital firms on business and product strategy, and is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School. His Lean Startup methodology has been written about in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, the Huffington Post, and many blogs. He lives in San Francisco.

Overview

Our current economic environment is favorable for innovative startups, but there’s no consensus as to the best strategies these companies should use to find and maintain growth. Some managers randomly try out different solutions to see what will work, creating as many failures as successes. The chances of being successful can be significantly increased simply by taking a rational and systematic approach to finding the best strategy for running the business.

The Lean Startup is a method to develop and manage startups. Standard business practices can be harmful to startups. These organizations necessitate special policies and procedures for managing innovative enterprises. These policies and procedures aren’t created randomly, of course — they’re the result of scientific techniques and research.

The book offers a systematic, scientific way for business managers to get the information they need to make fast decisions in today’s changing world. While it may be impractical to follow this method to the letter in every situation, executives should come away from the book with a fresh viewpoint on the problems they face and the decisions they must make.

3 Key Phases of Lean Startup

Vision: Identify the entrepreneur, define the startup, define progress through validate learning using the scientific method

Steer: Create build-measure-learn feedback loops by;

.identifying leap-of-faith assumptions (aka killer questions)
.building a minimum viable product (MVP) to test assumptions tested
.appropriate accounting to track progress and decide if a major change/pivot is necessary

Accelerate: Go through subsequent build-measure-learn feedback loops as quickly as possible using small-batch manufacturing concepts. Continue feedback loops even as the product becomes successful