Entrepreneurs are Everywhere
You don’t have to work in a garage to be in a startup. You can be anywhere at any time, even working within an established company. The key is thinking big, starting small, and scaling fast.
Entrepreneurship Is Management
A startup is an institution, not just a product, so it requires entrepreneurial management, a new kind of management specifically geared to its context of extreme uncertainty.
Build-Measure-Learn
The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then quickly decide how to move forward. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop.
Validated Learning
Startups don’t primarily exist to make stuff, make money, or serve customers. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business. This learning can be validated scientifically, by running experiments that allow us to test each element of our vision and make pivot-persevere-kill decisions.
Innovation Accounting
To improve entrepreneurial outcomes, and to hold entrepreneurs accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to setup milestones, how to prioritize work. This requires a new kind of accounting, specific to startups.
What Are Build-Measure-Learn Loops
Speed is key. At Lean Startup Co we help teams move as quickly as possible to learn as much as they can about the initiative they are working on using a Build-Measure-Learn approach.
Build:
Using inputs from prior research or recent experiments, teams create just enough of a product experience to draw out insights from their target customers.
Measure:
Teams then put that product experience into the hands of their customers and measure the reactions. What do customers do in response to the opportunity presented to them?
Learn:
Teams collect and synthesize the data that emerged and use the insights to inform the next cycle of learning.
Data Drives Decision-Making
As you build and test your new product ideas with segments of your customer base, your data will reveal to you what decision is most appropriate before restarting the build-measure-learn loop again.
Process drives culture, not the other way around
Without strong leadership who are comfortable with experimentation and learning, and a holistic system that can hold leaders and teams accountable for success, organizations typically struggle to innovate consistently. This is why we consider entrepreneurial management to be an important part of product leadership.
When companies organize people, culture, process, and accountability together appropriately, customer-focused development and innovation become part of your DNA.
Put the principles and methodologies of The Lean Startup into practice at your company.
