The Lean Startup (Eric Ries, 2011) — Book Summary
Favorite Part
One of my favorite part of the book is when Eric Ries talks about The Five Whys. He explained about The Five Whys, how to do it (in a general way), and several case studies related to The Five Whys.
Looking back, I felt that there are some problems that would be resolved if only we tried to solve it using the Five Whys because (1) we would be solving the root cause of a problem, instead of just the superficial cause of it; and (2) there would be no blame to a particular department, instead all stakeholders would be analyzing and agreeing on the root causes together, and all stakeholders would commit to incremental improvement.
At the root of every seemingly technical problem is a human problem. Five Whys provides an opportunity to discover what that human problem might be.
(Chapter 11 of The Lean Startup)Five Whys transcend root cause analysis by revealing information that brings your team closer through a common understanding and perspective.
(Chapter 11 of The Lean Startup)
Favorite Quotes
I push my team to first answer four questions:
- Do consumers recognize that they have the problem you are trying to solve?
- If there was a solution, would they buy it?
- Would they buy it from us?
- Can we build a solution for that problem?
(Mark Cook in Chapter 4 of The Lean Startup)
Success is not delivering a feature, success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.
(Chapter 4 of The Lean Startup)Developing these experimentation systems is the responsibility of senior management; they have to be put in by the leadership. It’s moving leaders from playing Caesar with their thumbs up and down on every idea to — instead — putting in the culture and the systems so that teams can move and innovate at the speed of the experimentation system.
(Cook in Chapter 2 of The Lean Startup)Companies that cannot bring themselves to pivot to a new direction on the basis of feedback from the marketplace can get stuck in the land of the living dead, neither growing enough nor dying, consuming resources and commitment from employees and other stakeholders but not moving ahead.
(Chapter 8 of The Lean Startup)When an entrepreneur has an unclear hypothesis, it’s almost impossible to experience complete failure, and without failure there is usually no impetus to embark on the radical change a pivot requires.
(Chapter 8 of The Lean Startup)
