[[blog/video-the-scaling-dilemma-mary-poppendieck.md|Video_ The Scaling Dilemma - Mary Poppendieck]] [[book-lean-startup-eric-ries.md|Book_ Lean Startup - Eric Ries]] [[agile-for-humans-book-recommendations.md|Agile for Humans - book recommendations]] Read My rating: 1 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries (Goodreads Author) 4.07 · https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10127019-the-lean-startup?from_search=true# https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10127019-the-lean-startup?from_search=true# Rating details · 165,999 ratings · 2,630 reviews Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs - in companies of all sizes - a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever. (less) Get A Copy AmazonOnline Stores ▾Book Links ▾ Hardcover, 299 pages Published September 13th 2011 by Currency (first published January 1st 2011) Original Title The Lean Startup . ISBN 0307887898 (ISBN13: 9780307887894) . Edition Language English . Other Editions (57) All Editions | Add a New Edition | Combine …Less Detail edit details Edit My Activity Review of ISBN 9780307887894 Rating 1 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars Shelves non-fiction, read, startup-business-career edit Format Hardcover edit Status August 17, 2015 – Shelved as: startup-business-career4 Show more Review Add a review flag comment . Friend Reviews (9) 3.80 average rating Jan 01, 2014 Sandro Mancuso rated it it was amazing Like · comment Oct 13, 2014 Koen Metsu rated it really liked it Like · comment Jan 13, 2013 Stefan Billiet rated it really liked it Shelves: agile-management flag Like · comment Apr 30, 2018 Thomas rated it liked it Like · comment Dec 10, 2017 Erik Talboom rated it liked it Like · comment Oct 07, 2016 Guido is currently reading it Shelves: software flag Like · comment May 01, 2015 Jo marked it as to-read Shelves: self-learning flag Like · comment Apr 02, 2014 Mathias Verraes added it · review of another edition Like · comment Jan 06, 2014 Joris added it Like · comment Recommend This Book… . Reviews from People You Follow (1) Sep 05, 2014 Rod Hilton marked it as may-never-read flag Like · comment . Reader Q&A Ask the Goodreads community a question about The Lean Startup ![[./resources/book-lean-startup-eric-ries.resources/30721486.ux100_cr00100100.jpg]] Popular Answered Questions really good book but why, oh why, do these sort of books have to be so dry? 28 likes · like · 4 years ago · See all 7 answers Vishell Because you need to digest knowledge in the fastest way so you will have more time to apply that knowledge to your startup! flag Comment être informé de la sortie de la version française ? 2 likes · like · 2 years ago · See all 2 answers Tereza This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler) flag See all 21 questions about The Lean Startup… . Lists with This Book Entrepreneurs’ Book Club Reading List 319 books — 434 voters Before Starting a Startup…read these 120 books — 237 voters More lists with this book… . Community Reviews Showing 1-30 4.07 · Rating details · 165,999 ratings · 2,630 reviews ![[./resources/book-lean-startup-eric-ries.resources/loading-45f04d682f1e9151cf1e6fb18a1bde21.gif]] More filters | Sort order . Nov 15, 2011 Herve rated it liked it After reading Clayton Christensen, Geoffrey Moore and Steve Blank, I was expecting a lot from The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. I was disappointed. It could be that I did not read it well or too fast, but I was expecting much more. But instead of saying what I did not like, let me begin with the good points. Just like the previous three authors, Ries shows that innovation may be totally counterintuitive: “My cofounders and I are determined to make new mistakes. We do everything wrong. We build a minimum viable product, an early product that is terrible, full of bugs and crash-your-computer-yes-really stability problems. Then we ship it to customers before it’s ready. And we charge money for it. After securing initial customers, we change the product constantly. […] We really had customers, often talked to them and did not do what they said.” [page 4] On page 8, Eric Ries explains that the lean startup method helps entrepreneurs “under conditions of extreme uncertainty” with a “new kind of management” by “testing each element of their vision”, and “learn whether to pivot or persevere” using a “feedback loop”. This is he Build-Measure-Learn process. He goes on by explaining why start-ups fail: 1- The first problem is the allure of a good plan. “Planning and forecasting are only accurate when based on a long, stable operating history and a relatively static environment. Startups have neither.” 2- The second problem is the “Just-do-it”. “This school believes that chaos is the answer. This does not work either. A startup must be managed”. The main and most convincing lesson from Ries is that because start-ups face a lot of uncertainty, they should test, experiment, learn from the right or wrong hypotheses as early and as often as possible. They should use actionable metrics, split-test experiments, innovation accounting. He is also a big fan of Toyota lean manufacturing. I loved his borrowing of Komisar’s Analogs and Antilogs. For the iPod, the Sony Walkman was an Analog (“people listen to music in a public place using earphones”) and Napster was an Antilog (“although people were willing to download music, they were not willing to pay for it”). [Page 83] Ries further develops the MVP, Minimum Viable Product: “it is not the smallest product imaginable, but the fastest way to get through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop.” Apple’s original iPhone, Google’s first search engine, or even Dropbox Video Demo were such MVPs. More on Techcrunch [page 97]. He adds that MVP does not go without risks, including legal issues, competition, branding and morale of the team. He has a good point about intellectual property [page 110]: “In my opinion, […the] current patent law inhibits innovation and should be remedied as a matter of public policy.” So why did I feel some frustration? There is probably the feeling Ries gives that his method is a science. [Page 3]: “Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.” [Page 148]: “Because of the scientific methodology that underlies the Lean Startup, there is often a misconception that it offers a rigid clinical formula for making pivot or persevere decisions. There is no way to remove the human element - vision, intuition, judgment - from the practice of entrepreneurship, nor that would be desirable”. I was probably expecting more recipes, as the ones Blnak gives in The Four Steps to the Epiphany. So? Art or science? Ries explains on page 161 that pivot requires courage. “First, Vanity Metrics can allow to form false conclusions. […] Second, an unclear hypothesis makes it impossible to experience complete failure, […] Third, many entrepreneurs are afraid. Acknowledging failure can lead to dangerously low morale.” A few pages before (page 154), he writes that “failure is a prerequisite to learning”. Ries describes a systematic method, I am not sure it is a science, not even a process. Indeed, in his concluding chapter, as if he wanted to mitigate his previous arguments, he tends to agree: “the real goal of innovation: to learn that which is currently unknown” [page 275]. “Throughout our celebration of the Lean Startup movement, a note of caution is essential. We cannot afford to have our success breed a new pseudoscience around pivots, MVPs, and the like” [page 279]. This in no way diminishes the traditional entrepreneurial virtues; the primacy of vision, the willingness to take bold risks, and the courage required in the face of overwhelming odds" [page 278]. Let me mention here a video from Komisar. Together with Moore and Blank, he is among the ones who advise reading Ries’ book. I am less convinced than them about the necessity to read this book. I have now more questions than answers, but this may be a good sign! I have been more frustrated than enlightened by the anecdotes he gives or his use of the Toyota strategy. In na interview given to the Stanford Venture Technology program, Komisar talks about how to teach entrepreneurship. Listen to him! To be fair, Eric Ries is helping a lot the entrepreneurship movement. I just discovered a new set of videos he is a part of, thanks to SpinkleLab. Fred Destin had also a great post on his blog about the Lean Startup and you should probably read it too to build your own opinion. Lean is hard and (generally) good for you. Fred summaries Lean this way and he is right: “In the real world, most companies do too much development and spend too much money too early (usually to hit some pre-defined plan that is nothing more than a fantasy and / or is not where they need to go to succeed) and find themselves with an impossible task of raising money at uprounds around Series B. So founders get screwed and everyone ends up with a bad taste in their mouth. That’s fundamentally why early stage capital efficiency should matter to you, and why you should at least understand lean concepts.” Let me finish with a recent interview given by Steve Blank in Finland: I have devoted the last decade of my life and my “fourth career” to trying to prove that methods for improving entrepreneurial success can be taught. Entrepreneurship itself is more of a genetic phenomenon. Either you have the passion and drive to start something, or you don’t. I believe entrepreneurs are artists, and I’d like to quote George Bernard Shaw to illustrate: “Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.” Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development, Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a “science,” and anyone could do it. I’m beginning to suspect this assumption may be wrong. It’s not that the tools are wrong. Where I think we have gone wrong is the belief that anyone can use these tools equally well. When page-layout programs came out with the Macintosh in 1984, everyone thought it was going to be the end of graphic artists and designers. “Now everyone can do design,” was the mantra. Users quickly learned how hard it was do design well and again hired professionals. The same thing happened with the first bit-mapped word processors. We didn’t get more or better authors. Instead we ended up with poorly written documents that looked like ransom notes. Today’s equivalent is Apple’s “Garageband”. Not everyone who uses composition tools can actually write music that anyone wants to listen to. It may be we can increase the number of founders and entrepreneurial employees, with better tools, more money, and greater education. But it’s more likely that until we truly understand how to teach creativity, their numbers are limited. Not everyone is an artist, after all." (less) flag 124 likes · Like · 13 comments · see review Apr 08, 2012 Andy Stager rated it really liked it I’m currently starting a new church as well as helping my wife run a bow tie business. This book is about entrepreneurship, and its examples mostly come from the software development industry. Nevertheless, there was much food for thought here. Takeaways: 1. Put out a ‘MVP’. As fast as possible, put out a ‘minimum viable product’ and see if anyone is willing to buy it. If you spend forever making the product the best it could possibly be, you may end up with a cool product that no one actually wants or is willing to pay for. Throw the product out there, then improve it bit by bit. We accidentally did this with our bow tie biz, and are intentionally doing it with the church. 2. Avoid ‘vanity metrics.’ Anyone can generate hype and a short-lived interest in just about any product. Real, sustainable success is driven not by hype but by discovering something that people actually want or need, offering it to them, and then continually innovating the product based on a greater understanding of what people want/need. We’re trying to do this in both the bow tie biz and with the church: word-of-mouth viral marketing and social media are about the only way we’ve drawn people to either ‘product’. The growth is slower and steadier, but, we hope, more sustainable than using a flash marketing stunt that might give us a lot of temporary excitement. 3. Be lean. Learn from Toyota’s manufacturing and respond quickly to customer feedback to provide monthly, weekly, or even daily iterations of your product. Again: don’t build it and expect people to come—especially if you’re only going to build once a year. Constantly iterate. We’re doing consistent minor tweaks with the church and the bow biz rather than working hard at one “big launch”. In fact, we’re avoiding the notion of a “launch” altogether in the church plant. We’re not astronauts, and we don’t need rocket boosters. Momentum can come in other ways than going from land to space in 5 minutes. (less) flag 71 likes · Like · 5 comments · see review Dec 26, 2012 Stephanie Sun rated it really liked it Shelves: ebook, internet-is-people “The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built?” I wasn’t too surprised to find that Eric Ries is a great writer: clear, intellectually honest, articulate, and good-humored. As Ries readily admits in the Epilogue, the theories and frameworks promoted in this book have the danger of being used retroactively to justify what you did in the past, or what you’ve already decided that you want to do, no matter your industry. Its success no doubt has to do with its take control of your chaotic reality self-help vibe. What’s most important in this book is not the snappily named tools (MVP, Concierge, pivot, Build-Measure-Learn) but Ries’s less sexy advice, like: “it’s the boring stuff that matters most.” “Remember if we’re building something that nobody wants, it doesn’t much matter if we’re doing it on time and on budget.” “Customers don’t care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.” Copy, paste, print these lines out, stick them on every wall of your startup: even the bathroom’s. (less) flag 46 likes · Like · 2 comments · see review Nov 13, 2011 Adam Bradley rated it liked it I think this book could have been effectively distilled into one of about a fifth the length – and provided me with a much faster feedback loop on the ideas it contained. So consider that an example of the author not abiding by his own principles. Another example of the book not abiding by its own counsel: in recounting case studies, he assures us that the case studies are “successful” by telling us about venture funding and acquisition offers, which seem to me to be examples of the ultimate “vanity metrics” (getting speculators to bet on you is not synonymous with success). The basic insights of the book are valuable, but they are described with only enough detail for the reader to make a few false starts at applying them, recognize their failures retroactively but probably not predictively (a “vanity metric” is one which, by definition, causes you to make the wrong decision – but you don’t know it’s the wrong decision when you choose which metrics to ignore), and probably go one to hire a consultant who can help you actually fill in the blanks of how to apply the concept to your particular business. (less) flag 33 likes · Like · 5 comments · see review Aug 31, 2011 José rated it liked it Shelves: owned, kobo As I read chapter after chapter I found myself thinking ‘Great introduction to the topic, now let’s hope the next one contains some real meat’. Unfortunately that feeling accompanied me until the end of the book. Don’t get me wrong, this book contains a lot of useful ideas if you are into entepreneurship: the build-measure-lean cycle driven by the knowledge you want to acquire, validated learning, treating everything as en experiment with its corresponding actionable metrics… but maybe I expected a little more insight into all these things. Instead of a thorough description of each of the concepts we have a series of front line stories illutrating them. The only points that are fully developed are the pivot types and the possible engines of growth. So after finishing the book I’m left with the feeling that, while now I have some sound guides to use, there’s a lot of information I must research out there. (less) flag 26 likes · Like · 4 comments · see review Jun 16, 2012 Jon-Erik rated it it was ok Shelves: law-professional-development, economics-markets If I was reviewing the idea in this book, it would get 5 stars. As a book, there are few problems. First, just stylistically, I feel like I’m being lectured by a precocious toddler about how to do things. The tone is professorial, to put it charitably. Second, there is a bit of incongruity between a system explaining that you need to engage in scientific testing in almost Popperian fashion on the one hand and a series of case studies on the other. Case studies are, of course, the currency of business school. But they’re about as scientific as the Psychic Hotline. And this is because sometimes science can only tell us that a system is complex beyond our divination. Third, when I don’t feel like I’m being lectured, I feel like I’m being sold. This book seems like a portfolio of the author’s work with a few sexy add ins like Facebook for effect. I’m not surprised that most of the reviews here are Goodreads are glowing. Most of the time, a brilliant idea is enough. The idea of taking an idea and turning it into something is exciting. But really, it is the execution that matters. That’s really what the book is saying: it’s saying, screw your original brilliant idea. Take it and evolve it! And do that using facts! I saw Ries’s interview with Gavin Newsom totally by accident. I was glad to see him talking about some of the challenges entrepreneurs face aren’t solved by the creation of new tax loopholes. But his delivery only confirmed my sense from the book: a lot of people are going to be turned off by his baby face matched with his know-it-all tone. This is too bad, because folks shouldn’t dismiss these ideas. I do question whether this is something that can apply as universally as the author claims. The majority of examples in the book are web services that run in the cloud. They don’t depend on the rainfall in Sacramento affecting the price of soy in six months affecting the price of an item on my menu. Some businesses can’t adjust on the fly without significant destruction. Now, with all those caveats, I will have to admit that I will be (perhaps more humbly) applying some of the ideas I found in this book. (less) flag 21 likes · Like · comment · see review Dec 29, 2016 Peter rated it it was amazing Shelves: business, top-20-business Learning The Lean Startup is an important and highly acclaimed book for new startup ventures. It is one of the core business books that revolutionised the business startup environment over this last decade. Eric Ries stripped everything down to the core basic principles of being lean and agile in response to customer feedback. This is not new but is collated and distilled in a very dynamic, yet clear structured manner. It must also be said that the Lean Startup is heavily biased towards the software industry and while also coming from that industry I may be unaware of how effective this approach is in other sectors, especially those that are heavily regulated and limited to the opportunity to, in reality, deliver prototypes to customers. I really appreciated the book’s celebration that you don’t have all the answers, and you’re not expected to if you’re a startup with an innovative solution. The major point, however, is that you shouldn’t pretend or act like you do but embrace the uncertainty and develop an experimental approach to delivering a Minimum Viable Product – build, measure, learn. There is the other perspective that to truly know your value and where you’re going you should start with the presumption that you will dominate the industry and your solution is a game changer. Zero to One by Peter Thiel asserts this position. Personally, I feel you need to have both the end game as a vision and have some idea what that would look like. But also, the practical next steps on the day to day basis of how you prove and correctly position your company for initial customer acquisition is crucial. I found The Lean Startup not only great for advice, techniques and the analogous stories to help reinforce the approach, but it is an inspirational book that dares you to challenge everything and rationalise with customer validation that your vision is viable and scalable. When a book affects me it starts a chain reaction in my thought process so that I either gain a better understanding of where I need to go or may enable me to articulate what has been sitting just out of reach in my mind. This is one of those books. Other books that reinforce this new startup environment and are worth reading include: • Business Model Generation – Alexander Osterwalder • Four Steps to the Epiphany – Steve Blank • The Startup Owner’s Manual – Steve Blank • Running Lean – Ash Maurya (less) flag 21 likes · Like · comment · see review Sep 12, 2017 Brian Yahn rated it really liked it It’s pretty rare for me, after finishing a book, to not be able to imagine my life not having read it. The Lean Startup is one of those books. Maybe my understanding of business is unimpressive, but I am very interested in the subject and read a good bit about it. Still, I found this book to be enlightening. In business – and in life – we always have simple goals, like: I want to make more money. It’s easy to focus our motivation on making more money. After all, it is what we want. But what we really need to do is focus our energy on LEARNING. What do I need to learn before I’m able to make more money? How do I learn that? It seems blatantly intuitive in hindsight, but this book really opened my eyes to it. At the core of Eric Ries’s message is this: Business and products are far too often founded on assumptions. We start building some product assuming people want it. We spend a lot of time trying to build the optimal product, and then – after it’s finished – we offer it to customers. But then we find out that customers don’t actually want the product in the first place. Our assumption was wrong. And just look at all that effort, time, and money wasted on developing it! I’m sure, from an academic standpoint, there are books much better than this. But it was an incredibly easy and fast read and even slightly humorous at times. (less) flag 19 likes · Like · comment · see review Sep 10, 2014 Sher❤ The Fabulous BookLover rated it really liked it Shelves: nonfiction-reads After initially giving this 3 stars I had to go back and give this 4 Stars. This book is amazing for those starting a company, those who already own a company and those thinking about making that move. Beware, this book is better in practice than in theory. If you consider yourself an entrepreneur and are willing to put the principles into practice, then it’s worth reading. flag 18 likes · Like · 6 comments · see review May 03, 2013 Rick rated it liked it Shelves: 2013 This is a massively important book that turned out to be much harder to read than I expected, and left me still pretty confused about how to implement much of the advice in the book. But I like what it did to my thinking, even though I was familiar with many of the concepts in the book already. But boy, I sure do like Five Whys. I am so ready to have kids. There are some really wonderful simple quotes too: “management is human systems engineering.” “Our productive capacity greatly exceeds our ability to know what to build.” The latter was from the last chapter, which was my favorite. Ries gets a little existential about the raison d’etre of business and building things. I liked it. And this might sound a bit precious out of context, but it did get me quite excited: “What is needed is a massive project to discover how to unlock the vast stores of potential that are hidden in plain sight in our modern workforce. If we stopped wasting people’s time, what would they do with it? We have no real concept of what is possible..” (less) flag 15 likes · Like · 1 comment · see review Jan 26, 2018 Becky rated it it was ok Shelves: 2018, non-fiction, reviewed, work-homework, reference Assigned reading from my job, last minute, in preparation for a meeting. I managed it, and while I thought it made a lot of sense in terms of concepts and ideas, and parts of it were very interesting, the writing sucked all of the joy out of it. The first third of the book repetitively repeated stuff by saying it many times, often mirroring previously said things but slightly differently, but… oddly without saying anything of actual information value at all. The last two-thirds were better, mo …more flag 14 likes · Like · comment · see review Mar 14, 2012 Chris Johnson rated it really liked it This was a nice book that talks as much about Silcon Valley style culture as anything else. A ton of my peers are in mid-career finance/law/govenrment jobs. The only way they stay for years is if there is some sort of inefficiency that keeps them there. The utility of the tasks they perform isn’t much - at all. I loved the ethos that Eric shares…When a new employee makes a mistake: “SHame on us for making it easy for you to fail.” That type of accountability doesn’t exist, we have a “punish th …more flag 10 likes · Like · comment · see review Oct 27, 2011 Ismail Elshareef rated it liked it Shelves: nonfiction, business, reference I started reading Eric Ries’s blog, “Startup Lessons Learned,” back in October 2008. I was quickly impressed by his technical acumen and the simplicity of his writing. I also enjoyed the breadth of topics covered and how engaging they were. Needless to say, I was glad to hear that he was going to distill all his knowledge into a book, and now that I read the book, I’m glad to say that he didn’t disappoint. The book defines a startup as a 1) a human institution designed to 2) create a new product/s …more flag 8 likes · Like · 2 comments · see review Mar 08, 2018 Connor England rated it really liked it *** Eric Ries in the this book is very concise and to the point about what he wants to say. He goes straight to the point with stories from his own and from others that he has interacted with. This book opens your eyes to things you may have not realized before. He points out what everybody is doing wrong and how you can easily correct it. Now some parts of this book aren’t the easiest to understand if you have never tried to run a business. I figured out that the more you read the book the more …more flag 11 likes · Like · comment · see review Oct 20, 2011 Tom rated it liked it Shelves: business It’s a good book, and if everyone read and understood it I’m sure companies would be far more efficient at innovating. I felt some of the messages could have been made clearer by improving the style of the book. There are a few too many terms like “Engines of Growth” that cloud some of the meaning. My biggest criticism would be many of the anecdotes didn’t really do justice to the points Eric would later made. Unlike many management books that hammer home their point page after page, The Lean Sta …more flag 7 likes · Like · 2 comments · see review Dec 18, 2016 Nguyen Linh Chi rated it it was amazing Best book for start-ups. This book does not contain many fancy you-have-a-passion-just-do-it examples like other start-up books do. I appreciate the applicability of this book and recommend it to everyone. Takeaways: 1. Start-ups should focus on management, process, and discipline, which is counterintuitive to the conventional idea that start-ups should have a ‘just-do-it’ attitude. 2. Start-ups should develop Build-Measure-Feedback loop. Companies should develop a MVP to test market hypotheses. A …more flag 6 likes · Like · comment · see review Oct 10, 2012 George Wang rated it it was amazing I originally came across this title here: http://addicted2success.com/success-a… After hearing about the Lean Startup methodology time after time in the startup world, I decided to give this book a try. Although I’ve heard of the basics concepts like the Minimal Viable Product and the benefits of quick iterations, reading about the methodology in detail provided a lot more context to these concepts and helped me gave me the tools that I can use to put these concepts to action. The biggest epipha …more flag 6 likes · Like · 2 comments · see review Jul 28, 2013 Chad Warner rated it liked it Recommended to Chad by: Startup West Michigan Shelves: business, non-fiction This book applies science to entrepreneurship. It tells businesses, and especially startups, how to start small and simple, then grow through learning, testing, measuring, and rapidly innovating. It advocates “just-in-time scalability”: conducting product experiments without massive up-front investments in planning and design. It shows the value of actionable metrics for decision-making, and the importance of pivoting (changing course) when necessary. I found the book interesting, but not as eye- …more flag 5 likes · Like · comment · see review Nov 04, 2011 John rated it really liked it While I’m giving this a 4 star, I really want it to be a 3 and a half. 4 because it’s very motivating and there’s a lot of valuable techniques in there, especially around metrics, different businesses’ engines of growth, and running effective retrospective/5 whys meetings. 3 because it suffers from a lot of the “business bedside story” effect (see the halo effect for what that means) and there’s a pretty nasty survivor bias, a lot of not quite scientific papers are quoted, and some of the “succes …more flag 5 likes · Like · 1 comment · see review Oct 08, 2017 Andy rated it liked it This was very readable for a business book. The main point is to use the scientific method and test hypotheses instead of making assumptions. I agree but that’s not a shocking new idea. The plus value is his exploration of the human factors that derail rational testing in business organizations. He offers detailed instructions for overcoming those obstacles. So this seems promising, but in the spirit of the author’s message, I won’t just assume that his advice leads to sustained positive change. flag 5 likes · Like · comment · see review Jan 17, 2012 David rated it it was amazing Shelves: work Much better book than I expected. Eric explains his mindset and his approach to product development and how to run a start-up, and he makes TOTAL sense. I thought I knew concepts like validated learning & continuous deployment, but reading through this book really solidifies these ideas in my head. These insights are really impressive and I’m hoping I can apply some of the ideas in my next startup. flag 5 likes · Like · comment · see review Aug 21, 2012 Bülent Duagi rated it it was amazing Building block for entrepreneurs. Simple concepts with high applicability. flag 5 likes · Like · see review Mar 21, 2012 Fran Toolan rated it liked it Like most business books, the gems are embedded in the fluff. As someone who has run self (and under) funded startup companies for a very long time, it was good to see put into text what I’ve been doing all these years. But, being under funded, and hence always seemingly on the verge of failure, we had no choice but to employ the tactics given here. We always had to generate some kind of income to keep going, so we couldn’t afford to wait for perfect. We delivered the best we could, and innovated …more flag 4 likes · Like · comment · see review Dec 27, 2011 Bill Harrison rated it really liked it Shelves: best-business-books This book has acquired an iconic status among business books published in the last few years. I was first given a copy at a technology conference in San Francisco last year and since then it seems that everyone in my business network has read and is discussing this book. For the most part this popularity is justified. The book dissects the current trend toward quick, low-cost start-ups that focus on action over research, and on making mistakes over extended analysis. Its applicability is primari …more flag 4 likes · Like · comment · see review Dec 25, 2011 Jevgeni Holodkov rated it liked it This book is mostly a theoretical essay (though with a lot of examples) on how to apply “lean” ideas to startups and its execution. The main idea of this book is to follow and focus on (!) “build-measure-learn” loop when you run startup (or, actually, do anything). It basically means that we need not just do and learn, but rather do, learn and make sure we really learned something new. It is achieved with giving a claim (hypotesis setting) and testing that by checking clear metrics. If you knew, …more flag 4 likes · Like · comment · see review Sep 26, 2015 Miquel Reina rated it really liked it Shelves: skills, thinking, learning Lean Startup is an essential book for all those who want to start their own startup or have an idea to develop it. Through examples of real startups, one of which is the author’s own, Eric teaches us to detect problems that we face in the development and growth of our startup, giving us tips, techniques and skills that will minimize the risk to develop our bright idea. Although it is a very specific book is highly recommended for all entrepreneurs and creatives. Spanish version: Lean Starup es un …more flag 4 likes · Like · 3 comments · see review Dec 05, 2016 Tomasz Sabała rated it it was amazing In my opionion a must read for anyone working in any type of industry. Parapharsing the author: “We leave in times when we can build anything we can think of, the question is what to build”. flag 4 likes · Like · comment · see review Feb 05, 2017 Parth Agrawal rated it really liked it This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. flag 3 likes · Like · 1 comment · see review Apr 17, 2017 Kars rated it really liked it Shelves: non-fiction, management, business Much better than expected. I always shied away from Lean Startup because the name is like bullshit squared. But underneath the buzzwords is a decidedly Boydian and empirical take on new product development. Prioritizing for learning is a solid principle which can be used to eliminate a lot of waste. I also very much appreciate his repeated emphasis on cross functional teams. My only real gripe is his emphasis on speed. I think this is a misreading of Boyd. The focus should be on tempo. Speed imp …more flag 3 likes · Like · comment · see review Feb 12, 2019 Sotiris Makrygiannis rated it liked it Shelves: internet, audio-book Assuming that I didn’t know anything about startups? mandatory reading, otherwise this was rather the baseline for any new in the business of (B)(p)itching. The thinking to run experiments IS a MUST and standard practice on the basic theory of scientists (based on the scientific theory), add a bit of Six Sigma green belt and then you have this book. but then again, mandatory reading for new startupers flag 3 likes · Like · comment · see review « previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … next » . new topic Discuss This Book topics started by posts views last activity Is Gynexin Safe to Use? 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