The Lean Start-up was coined by Eric Ries to describe new trends in the start-up landscape as a combination of the use of open-source software, agile development methodologies and ferocious, customer-centric, rapid iteration. This signal explores the value of the approach, how we apply it to our work and how it can form a new philosophy for product development for agencies.
Best Lesson: "Learn First, Code Last" but is only a good lesson if coding has less to teach you at that point in time, not for big design up front
Another Lean UX talk at SXSW. Jeff Gothelf concentrated on the removal of temporary deliverable artifacts which I think is only part of the picture. I think i'm against the term Lean UX because integration is so key, no discipline in itself should be Lean and this presentation comes from a design perceptive only. But still good stuff in here!
Dave McClure's talk at SXSW was just awesome and sweary and awesome sweary. My favourite bit, in response to the audience Dave said "That is a really good question, and may make this entire talk irrelevant."
Steve Blank has expanded his thoughts on startup behavior, basically if we are in a bubble and you want to go down that route then you can build to sell not build to make money. When Steve presented this at SXSW, I got the feeling it wasn't his preferred option
Joshua Porter's Metric Driven Design talk at SXSW was very good and although not on the Lean Startup track, was very Lean Startup thinking. Andrew Chen even did a writeup of it.
Steve Blank has been running an experiment in teaching entrepreneurship at Stanford called Lean LaunchPad. His first blog post explains the model and introduces the nine teams, each with an awesome business idea. The second blog post talks about business model hypothesis testing.
Excellent case study on the application of UX and design expertise within the Lean Startup processes. Mostly its about balance of metrics driven decisions versus seeing the overall experience
Key Takeaway: Design - even major redesigns - can be part of an agile, lean startup environment, if done in an efficient way with a lot of iteration and customer involvement.
The ultimate mashup of Alex Osterwalder's Business Model Generation and Steve Blank's Customer Development. A must read.
WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg has an interesting take on releasing early, and releasing often. He says 'usage is oxygen for ideas':
On WordPress.com we deploy code to production twenty or thirty times a day and anyone in the company can do it ... In that short rapid iteration environment the most important thing isn’t necessarily how perfect code is when you send it out, but how quickly you can revert if you need to so the cost of a mistake is really low, under a minute of brokenness. Someone can go from idea to working code to production and more importantly real users in just a few minutes and I can’t imagine any better form of testing.
He goes on:
If you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long.
Because:
You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world.
The piece is well worth reading in its entirety.
Nice piece in the FT on Eric Ries and the lean start-up movement. Eric's definition of start-up should be an encouragement to any organisation thinking about lean, whether they're a start up or not:
