The Lean Startup

Posted by Sean on March 15, 2012

A friend lent me The Lean Startup over the weekend, and within two days the Mother Sponge universe has experienced a significant and fundamental thought-shift. The big lesson from author Eric Ries thus far – throw out assumptions, consider what you don’t really know, and find your way through new product development by testing ideas in the real world.

In other words, EXPERIMENT!

OK, experimental science is by no means a new idea, so what’s the big deal?

The big deal is that choosing between assumptions and experimental evidence can make or break you as a startup searching for an attentive audience, a product that’ll sell, a business in the black! And there is no way to really know if your assumptions are true unless you witness actual customers behaving in the way you hypothesized that they would.

Ries is among several current thought leaders in marketing and business discussing relating themes right now (see Seth Godin’s Poke the Box and 37Signals’ REWORK to name just a couple). And for good reason – experimentation is a lost art. Most of us lose the gift at some point in elementary school.

So ask yourself – do you really know there’s a market that will demand your incredible new product? Before assuming anything, couldn’t you start by running very quick, very inexpensive experiments to see who’s out there and what they want? And if you continued testing and learning in short cycles, might you collect a lot of invaluable data in a short span of time?

Maybe. Probably worth finding out.

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Inspiration, not Stagnation

Posted by Sean on December 12, 2011

An executive chef asks the same question to all interviewees at his restaurants; “What is the proper way to prepare rice?” The correct answer of course, is “whatever way you want it cooked, all-knowing one.”

While that management style may increase consistency, consider how downright detrimental it can be if used too often or too extensively. Restricted workers create stagnation. Workers become peons, perform the bare minimum, lose motivation, and eventually leave, forcing employers to spend a lot of time replacing them. That’s expensive (and boring).

Staff should be given some freedom to experiment, fail, grow, improve, and if you’re lucky, sometimes innovate! You can see this approach in action at Google, where engineers are allotted one day per week to work on projects that aren’t necessarily in their job descriptions. Low and behold, some of the most successful products at Google started in that sandbox (Gmail, Google News, Orkut, Adsense). That’s profitable (and exciting!).

Also worth considering–inspired people like to talk to other people (who would’ve thunk it?!?) People who love their job will often spread the word about where they work, talk about how great the products are, even recruit others to work there. That’s good marketing.

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