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 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, that meant with investors 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 your budget 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 possible 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 that 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 have to create what Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm 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’ve 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. 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 of innovation management.
At the end of the day, you’re trying to find ways of enabling your target audience to embrace your solution without having to commit to fully building it. It’s ‘land-and-expand’ strategies like this that are really working for startups at the moment because they allow customers to trial with limited commercial risk. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work for all technologies and so for some it doesn’t really matter how lean or agile you get in the development process, you still might not have a viable business!
The Lean Startup is a great place to start, but do yourself a favour and follow it up with some Geoffrey Moore, Clayton Christensen or even Seth Godin, because a surface-level understanding of technology development can be worse than not knowing the first thing about it
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