I’ve been banging on about The Lean Startup ever since Eric Ries wrote it in 2011. The problem I had in the early days though, was that you can’t retro-fit the thinking. If a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) wasn’t part of the initial development plan, then you weren’t just re-structuring, you were also re-setting expectations. Which, in both my cases, meant with founders who had already spent most of the development funds!
But now I’m facing another challenge. As the ideas behind MVP thinking gain mainstream momentum, it has become the de-rigueur transformational methodology and now everybody is trying to ‘fail fast’. Which is a bit odd, because nobody really wants to fail at all, particularly Eric Ries!
Eric Ries on 4 Common Misconceptions About Lean Startup
The key concept behind the MVP idea is to streamline a process to get something to market quickly and understand what is really adding value. So, you strip the proposition down, or break it up, or do whatever you need to make sure you’re not blowing investment on something nobody wants.
But the key word here is ‘something’, not ‘anything’. Figuring out what you already know, is figuring out nothing. Whilst throwing mud at walls to see what sticks is just guessing, and that can be more dangerous than learning nothing!
The idea is to find out as much as you can in the shortest time and the key to success, is having a business model that will flex to this. To do that, Ries assumes you’ve done your homework and you’re not acting on an executive’s whim or a market opportunity conceived on the back of a beer mat!
It’s not about getting anything out to market quickly for testing, it’s about getting the right thing out in a focused way. To do that, you also have to read Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore and create what he calls the ‘whole product experience’. This is a similar idea to Ries’ MVP, but it’s developed in the context of the conflicting dynamics of the early market. This is important because it emphasises the need to develop the experience – not just the quickest possible product – and explains why – even though they may have adopted lean methodology – a company might not be learning the right things.
That’s the problem when something like this becomes a bit too ‘trendy’, is that it starts to exist as a panacea in its own right, rather than a part of a wider story. While The Lean Start-up is undoubtedly a great piece of work, its ideas can’t survive in isolation, they have to be understood in a wider context.
Gavin McClement
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