I really wanted to dislike this book. I mean c'mon, how could reading a book help one make a better start up? It's similar to reading a book about how to drive a golf ball right? My response, kinda, the great golfers still have a coach telling them the insider secrets like, how to stand, what to think, best ways to judge the wind, how much to practice, and how much practice is too much practice. The Lean Start-up is this coach. Eric Ries has a pragmatic approach to getting a product to market quickly, measuring the results of the launch and learning from the launch to apply to the next release. He doesn't tell you how to make your business he tells you how to make your business better. (cliché statement of the day)
Eric, revolves the entire book around 6 primary subject matters.
- Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
- 5 Whys
- Innovation Accounting
- Build-Measure-Learn
- Split Tests
- Pivot Points
With each of the above topics he divides them into three categories
vision,
steer, accelerate and explains how the aforementioned points relate to building a successful product for your company. Eric translates this to not only start-ups but large established companies backing it up with real world examples from Intuit, a major established company to Dropbox a respective start-up when Eric was working with them.
I'll only focus on a few topics because some are very obvious in their meanings and others I really care about and wish deeply that all companies would follow. This should lead us right into Innovation Accounting:
To improve entrepreneurial outcomes and hold innovators accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work. This requires a new kind of accounting designed for start-ups—and the people who hold them accountable.
This definition says it all and to it I simply say "Yes, Damit, YES!" Eric adds to innovation accounting and discusses vanity metrics aka "success theater", which I have seen a bajillion times. In short vanity metrics is the work you do to make
yourself look better aka a super bowl add to bump traffic and give investors the appearance of traction.
The second point I want to cover is
Pivot Point. I agree with this term also and so does Andy Grove, who covered the exact same topic in his book he wrote more than 10 years before Eric's, "Only The Paranoid Survive," except Andy calls a
Pivot Point an
inflection point. A pivot point is when you examine your data and the data says, our current plan is not working and we should refocus on what we think is this a more profitable route. I'll use Andy G's example because it's better than Eric's. When he was the CEO of Intel the company made memory, at one point Andy and team decided they could not compete with the countries who were heavily subsidizing memory manufacturing, consequently he realized the real margins were in processor innovation and manufacturing. The rest is history.
If you're interested in making innovation production better or possibly trying to shake things up in your organization enough to keep you awake at night this is a great read.