The Lean Startup resume - part one: vision

CHAPTER 1 – START

• The myth of the loss of manufacturing capabilities: The huge productivity increases made
  possible by modern mismanagement and technology have created more productivity
  capacity than firms know what to do with. More output, less jobs.

• Lean thinking: drawing on the knowledge and creativity of individual workers, shrinking
  batch sizes, just-in-time production and inventory control, acceleration of cycle times.

• Progress measure: Instead of measuring progress in manufacturing by the production of
  high-quality physical goods, the lean startup measure progress through validated learning.

• Productivity: When people are used to evaluating their productivity locally, they feel that a
  good day is one in which they did their job well all day. The lean startup asks people to
  figure out the right thing to build – the thing customers want and will pay for – as quickly as
  possible.

• Build-measure-learn feedback loop: instead of making a lot of assumptions, you can make
  constant adjustments with a steering wheel called build-measure-learn. Through this process
  we can learn if and when to make a sharp turn – a pivot.

CHAPTER 2: DEFINE

• Innovation factory: A company´s only sustainable path to long-term economic growth is to
  build an “innovation factory” that uses lean startup techniques to create disruptive
  innovations on a continuous basis.

• Culture and systems: It’s moving leaders from playing Caesar with their thumbs up and
  down on every idea to – instead – putting in a culture and the systems so that teams can
  move and innovate at the speed of the experimentation system.

CHAPTER 3: LEARN

Validated learning is not after-the-fact rationalization or a good story designed to hide
failure. It is a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil
of extreme uncertainty in which startups grow. Validated learning is the process of
demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a startups
present and future business prospects. It is more concrete, more accurate, and faster than
market forecasting or classical business planning.

Learning is the essential unit of progress for startups. The effort that is not absolutely
necessary for learning what customers want can be eliminated. This is validated learning,
because it is always demonstrated by positive improvements in the startups core metrics.
Validated learning is backed up by empirical data collected from real customers.

The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment. The
question is not “can this product be built?” but “can this product be built?” and “can we
build a sustainable business around this set of products and services.

Your job is to find a synthesis between your vision and what customers would accept; it
wasn’t to capitulate to what customers thought they wanted or to tell customers what they
ought to want.

• True startup productivity: systematically figuring out the right things to build. In the lean
  startup, every product, every feature, every marketing campaign – everything a startup does
  – is understood to be an experiment designed to achieve validated learning.

• Lean thinking: Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer, anything
  else is waste. In a manufacturing business, customers don’t care how the product is
  assembled, only that it works correctly. But in a startup, who the customer is and what the
  customer might find valuable are unknown, part of the very uncertainty that is an essential
  part of the definition of a startup.

CHAPTER 4: EXPERIMENT

"One of the most important lessons of the scientific method – if you cannot fail, you cannot learn."

The experiment phase: it begins with a clear hypothesis that makes predictions about what
is supposed to happen. Startup experimentation is guided by the startups vision. The goal of
every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that
vision. Even when experiments produce a negative result, those failures prove instructive
and can influence strategy. In the lean startup model, an experiment is more than just a
theoretical inquiry; it is also a first product.

The two most important assumptions entrepreneurs make are:

• The value hypothesis – test whether a product or service really delivers value to
  customers once using it.
• The growth hypothesis – test how new customers will discover a product or service.

The product manager usually says “I want this”, and the engineer answers “I am going to
build that”.

Instead answer 4 questions:

1. Do consumers recognize that they have the problem you are trying to solve?
2. If there was a solution, would they buy it?
3. Would they buy it from us?
4. Can we build a solution for that problem?

"Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem."