Book Summary: The Lean Startup

The Lean Startup — Eric Ries

The Lean Startup

by Eric Ries

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Resonating Message

We must rethink the way we look at business, creating a culture and environment that insists assumpted be stated and tested rapidly, to efficiently identify and validate value and growth hypothesis — to scientifically uncover how to turn a company vision into a sustainable business model.

Chapter in one sentence

1. START: Startups have a lot of uncertainty, but this does not exclude them from requiring management of a portfolio. Instead, this management must focus on rapid inspection and adaptation in line with a vision — actively encouraging failure to quickly validate testable predictions.
2. DEFINE: Leadership must move away from traditional management paradigms, working instead to establish a strong vision, and then creating an environment that supports entrepreneurship and experimentation in a build-measure-learn cycle for all of its employees in pursuit of that vision.
3. LEARN: Lean startups need to use validated learning as their primary measure of progress — treating all business decisions as experiments to validate, focusing on understanding if the product should be built, and can form a sustainable business model.
4. EXPERIMENT: The goal of a startup is to maximise learning through validation of key hypothesis, and rapid build-measure-learn cycles to rapidly obtain validated learning and inform the creation of sustainable business model in line with the target vision.
5. LEAP: Identify leap of faith assumptions that are critical to the success or failure, carefully select and rapidly test key assumptions to adapt and hone in on the value and growth factors, and the customer archetype that will support and direct your strategy.
6. TEST: Focus on building an MVP that isn’t necessarily a working product, but whatever mechanism you can identify that ensures the fastest possible cycle through the build-measure-learn loop to validate business hypothesis.