Web 2.0 Expo SF 2010: Eric Ries, "The Lean Startup: Innovation Through Experimentation. ..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i65PaoTlVKg- Lean Startup: Human institution designed to create something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
- Pivot: change direction but stay grounded in what we've learned
- Zig-zag from initial idea to eventual success
- Need to reduce time between pivots
- Unit of progress is validated learning (not line of code (Agile) or SDLC stage (Waterfall))
- Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop
- Build -> code -> Measure -> data -> Learn -> ideas -> Build
- Does this change minimise the total time through the feedback loop? Or does it sub-optimise by helping us do only our narrow job function well?
- What helped me is the insight from the Theory of Constraints that in a dynamic system anything that optimizes the sub-parts tends to sub-optimize the whole. Which is a fancy way of saying: focus on total time through the loop, not on the time of any individual activity. [blog]
- One full turn through loop = Pivot
- Techniques that operate at different stages of loop but have effect of helping minimise total time through feedback loop - stop wasting people's time:
http://blogs.reuters.com/small-business/2010/04/27/top-5-myths-about-the-lean-startup/
- Myth 1: Lean means cheap. Lean startups try to spend as little money as possible.
- Myth 2: The Lean Startup methodology is only for Web 2.0, Internet and consumer software companies
- Myth 3: Lean Startups are bootstrapped startupsMyth 4: Lean Startups are very small companies
- Myth 5: Lean Startups replace vision with data or customer feedback
http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/09/new-version-of-joel-test-draft.html
