Got my copy of the Lean Startup Book (2)

The Lean Startup (Part I Vision)

I’m reading the book slowly. I live in Fukui and everytime I have a business trip to Tokyo, I carry the book and proceed reading… fun read actually.

Here’s my mindmap of Part I — Vision on the left side. This vision part has 4 chapters;

1. START
2. DEFINE
3. LEARN
4. EXPERIMENT

In START, he mentions TPS(Toyota Production System) as a root of Lean thinking. In Lean-manufacturing, progress is measured by high-quality physical goods. But what is it for startups ? He introduces “Validated Learning” as a unit of progress in Lean Startup.

He points out that the traditional management can handle failures only as one of the two reasons. “Failure to plan adequitely” or “failure to execute properly”. But we require failure and learning on the way to success. This is where “Learning” comes from.

And here’s the vision/strategy/product triangle. To achive Vision, we employ Strategy which results in Product. Changing Product is called “Optimization”, and changing strategy is called “Pivot”.

In DEFINE, he defines what a startup is, and LEARN Chapter was  the most fun read. He tells a story of IMVU. It describes how IMVU’s first “avatar” with a brilliant strategy beautifully failed ! And how he found the progress is not measured by the lines of code written, but should be measured by the learning about the customer. In EXPERIMENT, you can find more stories about Zappos, HP(community voluntieer program), Kodak Gallery and Village Laundry Services(VLS), etc.

As a Lean/Agile practitioner in software development myself, it is very inspiring that Eric applies Lean principles not in the practice level, but from the principle level in the context of startups — uncertain business. He must have actually thought hard “what is value?” in startups from his experiences. Once you see the value, you can define waste as the rest. So in Lean Startup, he proposes a fast and lean process and management to acquire values — validated learning about customers.

To be continued… maybe. The previous post of this series is here. http://changevision.wordpress.com/2011/10/23/got-my-copy-of-lean-startup-book-1/ )

And here’s the full mindmap via Astah Publish, which is a web publisher of software diagrams. http://p.astah.net/a/oqvdiyl4

-Kenji

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