Author: Eric Ries · Published: 2011 · Genre: Business, Startups
The Lean Startup‘s biggest strength is a simple, testable method: treat every product idea as a hypothesis, test it with the smallest possible experiment, and let evidence decide what you build next. Its biggest weakness is that a few strong ideas are padded out to book length, and the method fits cheap-to-change software far better than hardware, drugs or other deep technology. It’s worth reading for first-time founders and product managers inside companies of any size.
The core ideas
Ries defines a startup as an organization built to create something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. His method for handling that uncertainty:
- Validated learning. Progress is not code shipped or features added, but what you have learned about customers, proven with real data.
- Build-Measure-Learn. Turn ideas into products quickly, measure how customers respond, and learn whether to change course. The goal is to go around this loop as fast as possible.
- The minimum viable product. Build the smallest thing that can test your key assumption. Sometimes that is not a product at all.
- Innovation accounting. Ignore vanity metrics such as total sign-ups, which almost always go up. Track actionable metrics, such as conversion rates by customer cohort, that show whether changes actually work.
- Pivot or persevere. Hold regular meetings to decide whether the evidence supports the strategy or calls for a structured change of direction, such as targeting a different customer segment.
What’s great
Ries is honest about his own failure. At IMVU, the company he co-founded, the team spent months building an instant-messaging add-on designed to work with existing networks, only to find customers didn’t want it. That story makes the case for testing early better than any abstract argument.
The examples of minimum viable products are memorable and practical. Dropbox tested demand with a demo video before the product was ready for the public. The founder of Zappos checked whether people would buy shoes online by photographing shoes in local stores and buying them at full price when an order came in. These show that an experiment can be cheap and still decisive.
The lean manufacturing ideas are well translated to software. Ries borrows the Five Whys from Toyota to find root causes, and makes a convincing case for small batches with a story about stuffing envelopes: doing one envelope at a time from start to finish beats doing each step for the whole pile. Continuous deployment and split testing follow naturally.
What’s weak
The book is repetitive. Its core could fit in a long essay, and later chapters restate earlier ones with new labels.
The minimum viable product has also been widely misused. Many teams hear minimum and ignore viable, shipping half-built products and calling it lean. Ries meant a tool for learning, not an excuse for poor quality, but the book’s enthusiasm for speed makes the misreading easy.
The method fits some industries far better than others. Consumer software can run experiments weekly; a medical device, chip or new drug cannot. Ries argues the approach applies to large companies and government too, but the examples here are thin. Peter Thiel’s Zero to One adds a sharper critique: endless iteration on customer feedback can lead to small improvements instead of bold products.
Finally, the evidence is mostly anecdotal, drawn from young startups whose later results are not always discussed.
Who should read it
First-time founders, product managers and innovation teams in larger companies should read it, focusing on the chapters on the minimum viable product and innovation accounting. Pair it with Steve Blank’s work on customer development, which Ries builds on, and with Zero to One for the opposing view.
Rating: 4/5
Image credits — Featured image: Image by betsyweber via Flickr, CC BY 2.0, cropped. In-article images: Image by Pedro Belleza via Flickr, CC BY 2.0; Photo by Paymo on Unsplash.
