The Lean Startup …in 30 Minutes: A Concise Summary of Eric Ries' Bestselling Book
Garamond Press
Language: English
Pages: 20
ISBN: 2:00362264
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Most startups fail.
In the media and popular culture, startup companies are often associated with alluring stories of excitement and success, but in reality, they face a high likelihood of failure.
With his bestselling book The Lean Startup, Eric Ries, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and pioneer of the Lean Startup movement, aims to reduce startups’ risk of failure and increase their likelihood of success by applying the principles of lean manufacturing to the field of entrepreneurship. Ries’ Lean Startup method provides entrepreneurs with an agile Build-Measure-Learn process, helping them to successfully develop products based on direct customer feedback.
Widely praised for its practical and actionable insights, The Lean Startup is essential reading for entrepreneurs in companies of all sizes, from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies.
The Lean Startup…in 30 minutes is the essential guide to quickly understanding the important ideas in Eric Ries’ bestselling book, The Lean Startup.
Offering an overview of Ries’ Lean Startup method, this concise summary gives entrepreneurs—independent of size or sector—the necessary tools for fostering innovation and developing successful products.
Chapter Summary The Lean Startup method applies lean manufacturing techniques to the process of innovation. These techniques can be applied in businesses across all sectors, from Fortune 500 companies and government organizations to nonprofits, because entrepreneurs are everywhere. Entrepreneurs, as defined by Ries, are the visionaries within all organizations, independent of size, stage, or sector. Startups are often armed with brilliant ideas, but must utilize process to convert these ideas
assumptions. The second challenge is to administer the tests without losing sight of the company’s overarching vision. While administering these tests, startups must also be careful not to fall into what Ries calls analysis paralysis, or an inability to act on the data that they capture. The process of capturing customer data, and then creating and/or refining hypotheses accordingly, is only useful if it ultimately informs the production and completion of a product. To avoid the trap of never
into account. First: a startup should measure its runway, or amount of time left before the company runs out of money, by the number of pivots it can still make. Second: pivots, and the acknowledgement of a failed product direction, require immense courage to undertake. Third: the meeting to discuss the pivot with employees requires joint, active participation from both the product development and business leadership teams. Fourth: failure to pivot is a mistake that even successful companies
The Five Whys method has two rules: first, startup organizations must be tolerant of first-time mistakes; second, they must never allow the same mistakes to happen again. In conjunction with these rules, the Five Whys method is successful when all team members affiliated with the problem are present during analysis of the root cause. This action empowers members, builds trust within the team, and prevents non-present members from engaging in what Ries calls the “Five Blames.” This measure also
empowering early-stage “entrepreneurs” to independently create products and hand them off to the larger organization for scaling. Second, the ethos of developing products with the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop must become a status quo of the organization; at first it may not seem easy, but once it is adopted for long-term use, the organization has the opportunity to sustain continuous innovation. Innovation is a function of process, not company size. Cultivating entrepreneurial processes can