Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything

Photography: Courtesy of the artist and the Wallace Trust Artwork: Sara Hughes, Download, 2005, acrylic on linen, 1.5 m x 1.5 m, Wallace Trust Collection Launching a new enterprise—whether it’s a tech start-up, a small business, or an initiative within a large corporation—has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. According to the decades-old formula, you write a business plan, pitch it to investors, assemble a team, introduce a product, and start selling as hard as you can. And somewhere in this sequence of events, you’ll probably suffer a fatal setback. But recently an important countervailing force has emerged, one that can make the process of starting a company less risky. The lean start-up movement hasn’t gone totally mainstream, however, and we have yet to feel its full impact. In this article I’ll offer a brief overview of lean start-up techniques and how they’ve evolved. The Fallacy of the Perfect Business Plan 1.

Lean Startups: Learning Over Working Software « The Hacker Chick Blog The Agile Manifesto, which we created to uncover better ways of developing software, says, We value Working Software over Documentation And we do. We’d much rather have actual, real live, working software then reams of documentation proclaiming all the great stuff this as-of-yet-nonexistent software is going to do at some point in the future. However, agile is also about learning and adapting. We value Learning over Working Software Agile helps us develop software as efficiently as possible – we can bang out quality code really fast with it. Startups aren’t just small versions of large organizations. “The unit of progress for entrepreneurs is learning, not execution.” – Eric Ries “Lean Startups are driven by a compelling vision, and are rigorous about testing each element of this vision against reality.” – Eric Ries We want to focus on the fundamental feedback loop between when we have an idea and when we’ve learned whether or not our idea makes sense. Eliminate Waste.

Agile Vs. Lean: Yeah Yeah, What’s the Difference? « The Hacker Chick Blog Is Agile the same as Lean? When people say “agile” do they really mean Scrum? Or do people still use different types of agile – and if so, why? Been getting a lot of questions lately, so thought I’d take a stab at this… Lean comes from Lean Manufacturing and is a set of principles for achieving quality, speed & customer alignment (same as what we’re trying to do with agile development, right?). Mary & Tom Poppendieck adapted the principles from Lean Manufacturing to fit software development and I believe these ideas actually provide the premises behind why agile works: In a nutshell, Lean says to relentlessly eliminate anything that isn’t adding value and only work on what we absolutely need to be doing at this moment in time. Lean also puts a very strong emphasis on what it calls “the system” – that is, the way that the team operates as a whole. Along those lines, Lean says to respect that the people doing the work are the ones that best know how to do it. And it’s principles are:

lean process