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

Contrary to traditional product development, which usually involves a long, thoughtful incubation period and strives for product perfection, the goal of the MVP is to begin the process of learning, not end it. Unlike a prototype or concept test, an MVP is designed not just to answer product design or technical questions. Its goal is to test fundame

For example, changing the definition of productivity for a team from functional excellence—excellence in marketing, sales, or product development—to validated learning will cause problems. As was indicated earlier, functional specialists are accustomed to measuring their efficiency by looking at the proportion of time they are busy doing their work

In traditional management, a manager who promises to deliver something and fails to do so is in trouble. There are only two possible explanations: a failure of execution or a failure to plan appropriately. Both are equally inexcusable. Entrepreneurial managers face a difficult problem: because the plans and projections we make are full of uncertain

by converting push methods to pull and reducing batch size. Both have the net effect of reducing WIP.

This pattern would repeat time and again, from the days when we were making less than a thousand dollars in revenue per month all the way up to the time we were making millions.

Innovation accounting works in three steps: first, use a minimum viable product to establish real data on where the company is right now. Without a clear-eyed picture of your current status—no matter how far from the goal you may be—you cannot begin to track your progress. Second, startups must attempt to tune the engine from the baseline toward th

Companies that rely on the viral engine of growth must focus on increasing the viral coefficient more than anything else, because even tiny changes in this number will cause dramatic changes in their future prospects.

even more engaging to them.

A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

As soon as we formulate a hypothesis that we want to test, the product development team should be engineered to design and run this experiment as quickly as possible, using the smallest batch size that will get the job done.