The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

The idea of the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop owes a lot to ideas from maneuver warfare, especially John Boyd’s OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) Loop. The most accessible introduction to Boyd’s ideas is Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business by Chet Richards. http://ericri.es/CertainToWin

Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. Through this process of steering, we can learn when and if it’s time to make a sharp turn called a pivot or whether we should persevere along our current path. Once we have an engine that’s revved up, the Lean Startup offers methods to scale and grow the business with maximum acceleration.

Their challenge is to overcome the prevailing management thinking that puts its faith in well-researched plans. Remember, planning is a tool that only works in the presence of a long and stable operating history.

However, all companies engage in all four phases of work all the time. As soon as a product hits the marketplace, teams of people work hard to advance it to the next phase. Every successful product or feature began life in research and development (R&D), eventually became a part of the company’s strategy, was subject to optimization, and in tim

Their challenge is to overcome the prevailing management thinking that puts its faith in well-researched plans. Remember, planning is a tool that only works in the presence of a long and stable operating history.

You cannot be sure you really understand any part of any business problem unless you go and see for yourself firsthand.

The value hypothesis tests whether a product or service really delivers value to customers once they are using it.

an organization designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Every business plan begins with a set of assumptions. It lays out a strategy that takes those assumptions as a given and proceeds to show how to achieve the company’s vision. Because the assumptions haven’t been proved to be true (they are assumptions, after all) and in fact are often erroneous, the goal of a startup’s early efforts should be to te