Justin McMurray's posts

The rise and rise of the lean startup movement seems to continue unabated - notwithstanding the odd notable dissenter ("fat startup" anyone?).

However, with its broader acceptance and adoption come some associated problems, most notably ones of understanding. Or more specifically misunderstanding of what lean is (and what it isn't).

I have no problem with people who understand the Lean Startup Movement approach and decide it's not for them (one hopes they have another approach to making something people want!). But as its fame spreads, and the level of 'lean understanding' spreads invariably er.. thinner, there will increasingly be those who reject it based on misconceptions or some incorrect assumptions that they are 'already doing it'.

So, it's time to confront some of these misconceptions... if only to avoid the déjà vu-esque prospect of tiresome and ongoing misunderstandings over what Agile really is and how to do it (hint: Agile is not about doing Waterfall quickly).

So here they are: some of the Lean Startup misunderstandings that we've encountered. 

OK, so we go on and on about lean startups here at Made by Many. And while it is indeed pretty tasty Kool-Aid, we're primarily obsessed with it because it's helping us deliver some great services that people actually want.

So what happens when a bright-eyed, fresh-faced MxMer joins the team having responded to a contract position asking for "curious" people?

Well, we start the indoctrination. So if you're a relative newcomer to lean startup movement, read on to see how Nicki Sprinz (@sprinzette) handled being thrown into the 'lean end'. 

I recently watched the utterly fantastic TED talk ‘The Happy Planet Index’ by Nic Marks. The talk covers a lot of sensible ground including why the environmental movement needs to shift their tactics as well as the quite stunning results from his research on measuring countries’ happiness in relation to life expectancy, contentment and ecological efficiency (hint: the results will surprise you).

It’s well worth 17 minutes of your time.

However it was his concluding comments about the key ingredients driving people’s happiness that really caught my attention. The principles, which Marks only had time to race through, came out of some research by the New Economics Foundation (nef) in 2008:

• Connect
• Be active
• Take notice
• Keep learning
• Give

(or How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Obvious)

(also know as ‘The empty hamburger dilemma’)

Most new products and services fail. This is a depressing reality to swallow, however I am amazed by how few people ask why this happens. Or worse still all the people who have an in-built assumption and acceptance that most new things should fail. This shouldn’t be the case.

Here is a sad graph showing total product failures.

Why all this failure?

You can talk and think about stuff for ages and ages before doing something or other. Why not just do something straight away and learn from that?

London was basking in unexpected sunshine and Tim Malbon (aka @malbonster) and I were wolfing down some fish and chips in Soho. His off-the-cuff comment stopped me cold – chip halfway to mouth – and in one way or another I have been thinking about it ever since (it was 6 months ago!).

‘Doing over planning‘ might be the simplest way to summarise the Agile philosophy that Made by Many so fervently pursues (a great non-tech articulation of the Agile approach to web apps is Getting Real by 37 Signals).

There’s a pretty cool iPhone app that I’ve been trying out for a few days nights which seems to capture the imagination of everyone I talk/Twitter/Facebook to.

It’s called Sleep Cycle and it purports to analyse and track your sleep patterns and then wake you at the optimum time in the morning (ie at the lightest sleep phase. You can check it out here (or purchase directly from iTunes for £0.59).

You set it up by placing your iPhone on the mattress (next to the pillow but not covered by it), and then the app uses the accelerometer to measure tiny movements in the mattress as you toss, turn and generally shift around.

We all know that the web is the greatest discovery engine (so far) ever conceived. And even if many of us experience an occasional overload anxiety, the array of tools to filter and manage all this goodness seem to be getting better and simpler (personally I’ve replaced delicious, StumbleUpon, digg and RSS/feed readers with just one thing; Twitter).

There’s also little doubt that the benefits of having the world and its information at one’s fingertips are immense and mind-blowing (although being able to resolve office/pub/dinner party discussions with the “why don’t we Google it?” seems to be a bit of a fun-killer). And I’m certainly no ‘serendipitard’ who believes that a surplus of information and algorithms are killing serendipity (as this recent debate so entertainingly raged).

Browsing a range of mobile phone websites, I was struck by the incredible similarities of the way different phones are showcased.

Yes there are microsites and flash animations and loads of 360 degree spinning devices, but at their heart, they look the same.

For starters, we were almost twice oversubscribed for the talk and only just managed to squeeze everyone into the room (thanks to BBH London for hosting us).

Manuel provided a fascinating ‘deep dive into data visualization’ covering its academic beginnings, his experiences curating VisualComplexity.com and what he believes is needed for this discipline to blossom in the future.

The power and beauty of data visualization is something that the crew at Made By Many always get excited about.

Making previously ‘invisible’ information visible, not to mention aesthetically stunning, is a fascinating and rapidly growing field.

So I’m super-delighted to let you know that Manuel Lima, all-round dataviz guru, curator of the brilliant Visual Complexity blog, and recent TED speaker, will be speaking in London at BBH’s offices next Tuesday 25 August between 3.30-4.30pm.