Name: Danielle Rose's review of The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Item: The Lean Startup
Rating: 4
Author: Danielle Rose

Eric Ries

"Most startups are built to fail. But those failures, according to entrepreneur Eric Ries, are preventable. Startups don't fail because of bad execution, or missed deadlines, or blown budgets. They fail because they are building something nobody wants. Whether they arise from someone's garage or are created within a mature Fortune 500 organization, new ventures, by definition, are designed to create new products or services under conditions of extreme uncertainly. Their primary mission is to find out what customers ultimately will buy. One of the central premises of The Lean Startup movement is what Ries calls "validated learning" about the customer. It is a way of getting continuous feedback from customers so that the company can shift directions or alter its plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than creating an elaborate business plan and a product-centric approach, Lean Startup prizes testing your vision continuously with your customers and making constant adjustments"--

How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

The Lean Startup

Guillaume Gelin

Piet Terheyden

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING SENSATION Most new businesses fail. But most of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach to business that's being adopted around the world. It is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. The Lean Startup is about learning what your customers really want. It's about testing your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it's too late. Now is the time to think Lean.

How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses

James Bedford

david

Outlines a revisionist approach to management while arguing against common perceptions about the inevitability of startup failures, explaining the importance of providing genuinely needed products and services as well as organizing a business that can adapt to continuous customer feedback.

Good for dev/tech orgs. Basic principle is to test things before going too far into assumptions 

Danielle Rose

Julian Paul

Great way of framing work with lots of actionable tactics. Good if you’re at a startup or just want to be more entrepreneurial at any organization.

Craig Jellick

Nast Marrero

This book compiles many of the principles that I understand as key to modern management's evolution.

It takes most of its ideas and concepts from Agile and Lean and rebrand them in a great marketinian way. This book has made mainstream many principles that will drive change towards better organizations and decissions both in society and business.

Since it compiles a collage of resources excepted from the vast Agile and Lean literature, it is somewhat poor on its instructions about how to implement the practices it advocates.

Obada Mu

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

JM Benedetto

A clear and well define method to improve inovation effectiveness. A must to read for any innovator.

Felipe Saldarriaga 

Por fin he podido darme la oportunidad de leer al gran recomendado y referente para quienes nos inspira la ruta de crear startups y seguir de cerca cómo se desarrollan. Cumple con todas mis expectativas y particularmente, como ingeniero industrial, el ver como se implementa la filosofía Lean en este punto me resulta supremamente interesante facil de asociar a mis posibilidades.

Hatem Abdelmowgoud 

The Lean Startup movement is based on the Lean Industry where the product or the service is built and shaped according to customers demands. It’s all about how you cut on wasting time and effort building products you like (or think you like) and start on building what the customer really wants. The book insists on the concept of experimenting your guesses. Basically, your work will be entirely a series of build-test-feedback loops. This may involve proving most of your primary guesses wrong through the process. You may wind up creating a product or providing a service which is completely different from your initial product or service.

Eric explains that his Lean ideas aren’t the opposite of organised management, but rather it’s a new style of management which doesn’t really focus on a hierarchical structure as much as it focuses on promoting creativity and producing the right product. The book approaches each concept by defining it, it’s origin, then it goes on how to implement the idea. The best thing about this book is how it provides you with a lot of case studies relevant to each concept written in a very interesting and direct way. Actually, those case studies are the only thing that convinced me with Eric’s ideas.

What I really liked about the book is that it doesn’t revolve around motivational speech and cliche statements. Unlike many entrepreneurship books, it cuts to the chase and provide you with a teachable know-how of the processes you will encounter everyday while starting a company. However, through reading the book, sometimes I felt that there’s a little bit of repetition, the author kept on repeating some ideas over and over. Anyway, maybe that’s a good thing to properly communicate the ideas.

I think that the Lean Startup revolutionise the way we think about management, it redefines the basic concepts of responsibility and accountability. This is why I’m not sure whether the Lean Startup model could be applied in large enterprises and established businesses or not. I don’t think when you have a 1000+ employees you can involve them in such way in the management, simply because not all of them will really “care” to participate in a highly flexible model like that. Also, most of the current top managers will fight Lean ideas anyway. However, Eric believes that the Lean Startup model is applicable to “any” business, and he actually provides some case studies which support his hypothesis.

Finally, if you have the least bit of interest in starting your own business, you'll certainly like the book.

John Elbing

I had a "failed" entrepreneurial attempt and I am not sure why, even if I could point to number of things we should have done differently. "Validated learning" is something we could have greatly benefited from!

Chris Raastad

“We would dedicate ourselves to the creation of new institutions with a long-term mission to build sustainable value and change the world for the better. Most of all, we would stop wasting other people’s time."

This is the bible of Startup renaissance of the 2010s. I came in with high expectations and they were exceeded. I thought I'd step into a masterclass on post-it notes and whiteboard lanes, build-measure-learn from customers, and basically reiterating what I think is common sense. Instead, Eric lays insights into why only 1 of the 4 companies I have worked for actually practiced innovation accounting and the night-and-day difference of results rigorous learning yields in innovative companies and teams.

I really enjoyed reading this book taking careful notes at the end of every chapter. Eric picks examples from his time at IVCM (which I still have never heard about until I googled it), Toyota, Intuit, Dropbox, and a bunch of other companies. The book is outlined well with chapter titles and section headers. It ages well into 2020 and should be on every startup founders' bookshelf.

Don't fall for vanity metrics, test your leap-of-faith hypotheses, and know when to persevere or pivot, reduce your batch size, adapt your organization, reduce waste, and be the most innovative you, you can be. This is the book to read to be an effective innovation manager.

* The Lean Startup Method
 * (1) Entrepreneurs are Everywhere
 * (2) Entrepreneurship is Management
 * (3) Validated Learning
 * (4) Build-Measure-Learn
 * (5) Innovation Accounting

Justin Ahinon

I started reading this book a little by chance after a trip I had made to a farm one weekend. A friend and I were thinking about starting a startup, and I was doing some research on the subject when I came across the book.

Let's just say it demystified and clarified a lot of things for me, on various subjects. First, starting even with the definition of a startup and the fact that it strongly emphasizes the uncertain nature of the environment in which it evolves. I feel like we (much more me) are ignoring this uncertainty, so it was instructive to see this recalled several times.

Beyond everything, "The Lean Startup" made me want to do it, to get started, and to contribute to the creation and progress of things I care about. Knowing me, it's a very curious desire, since I've always shied away from calling myself an entrepreneur (https://segbedji.com/i-never-thought-of-myself-as-an-entrepreneur).

Ricardo Parro

Second time I read it and it's def the bible of building startups

Nikolay Bachiyski

If your role contains either project or product, or you have heard the word project, this book is worth reading.

Please, don't treat it as a silver bullet. Just food for thought.

P.S. After reading it, I got into the habit of stating all the assumptions before starting any project. It makes a difference.

Hooman Askari

Kelly Kim

An insightful thought process behind creating and leading a successful startup. For me, the word 'lean' seems synonymous to flexible as a result of light structure. Some interesting lessons on how to avoid data-interpretation pitfalls, how to correctly cultivate a sustainable team in terms of performance, morale and innovation, and most importantly, how to treat/love your startup right.

Roger Dean Olden

A must read for anyone working in a tech-company.

Shreerag Plakazhi

Excellent resource for new and old startups. I gained a wealth of knowledge and can't wait to begin testing it out.

Kirill So

As many people already noted, I think this book can be a blog post. If you have already been reading a few tech-related books out there you probably know all the concepts, nevertheless for 1st-time entrepreneurs => invaluable.

Peter Hagen

The central idea of the book is to treat product development as discovering what people want, not to build out your ideas.

One of my favourite books of all time, it got me into entrepreneurship and valuing "doing" & iterating over everything else.

Marc Köhlbrugge

A classic every startup founder should read.

Was disappointed with this! It’s been on my shelf for ages because so many have recommended it to me. Just didn’t really feel as I took anything away from this at all. Everything is spoke about I already have read elsewhere, arguably more eloquently. 

If you are looking for a product focused book, check out Marty Cagan’s ‘Inspired’ & ‘Empowered’. They read much better.

david &
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

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