The Lean Startup: Validated learning vs wastage? And how do you know beforehand?

Knowledge is not power. Applying knowledge is power. Learning is useless. Validated learning is everything. If there is a single skill you have to learn to be massively successfulin the 21st century, it’s validated learning. It’s the only way to build a superior life strategy.

The concept of validated learning comes from the lean startup. The validated learning loop helps quickly validate or reject core business hypotheses. Instead of blindly trusting your business idea, you build a minimum viable product and then use a special set of metrics to validate the effect. You build a feature, you measure the results and so you learn what to do next — persevere or pivot.

“Startup success can be engineered by following the process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.”– Eric Ries

Startups work under a condition of extreme uncertainty and to succeed we must learn as quickly as possible that which part of our strategy is helping us to reach towards success and which one is not. Learning is extremely important function for every startup and it is quite common that people hide their failure with an excuse that we have learned a lot from this failure. We not only emphasis on learning but we must validate that learning quantifiable which is called “Validated Learning“.

Validated learning is more concrete and accurate as the results of this validation comes from the empirical data received from real customers and it is quite helpful in deciding whether to stick to the plan i.e., “Persevere” or do some adjustment in the product itself or tune overall strategy to achieve success. This adjustment is called “Pivot“.

Validated learning is a process of acquiring a new chunk of knowledge, immediately putting it into practice and then measuring results to validate the effects — if there is any value or not.

What you learn in the process should also lead you to the next step, to the next chunk of knowledge to acquire and test. It’s a loop that enables you extremely fast company’s growth and progress towards your goals.

If you don’t change your behavior, you haven’t learned anything new.

You put new knowledge to the test by conducting controllable experiments. You try a new behavior, a way to look at things or you put knowledge to practice and then observe and measure the results. You gather internal and external feedback.

VALIDATED LEARNING BASED ON METRICS

The process doesn’t yet end with applying knowledge. When you change your behavior,you have to measure if applying knowledge makes sense and if it works for you as a unique individual. Be aware that many times it doesn’t and you have to revert back to old patterns or try new things.

There’s nothing wrong if things don’t work as planned, that’s also part of validated learning. Every small failure leads you one step closer to success. Actually you never fail, you just find a way that doesn’t work. That means you’re a step closer to the right solution that will work.

The point is, if you want to do validated learning, you have to measure where applying new knowledge is leading you. Based on that, you decide whether to pivot or not.

External feedback is all the feedback you gather from your environment; from the people you work with to how your changes are related to environmental paradigms. You want to make sure that your environment supports you and that you adjust your strategy and tactics to the point where they enable you to achieve your goals as smoothly as possible.

You measure your feedback based on different metrics. Metrics can be qualitative or quantitative, but they show you real progress and the direction you’re going to. Below are some examples of life metrics you can measure.

You want to learn fast, but you also want to make sure that you really acquire knowledge and put it to the test, that you don’t lose comprehension when you are learning, and that you strategically decide what to learn next. You have to be a proactive learner with a strong attention span, not a reactive one.

In the same way, you don’t want to use learning as a handy excuse for failing. Oh I failed, but I learned a lot. Really, what did you learn? I don’t know. You want to be a really good strategic learner that knows how to transform knowledge into power. You want to learn from your failures and wrong assumptions. You want to be an effective validated learner.

There are many concepts that can help you with that. From employing different learning styles and challenging yourself with tests to preparing a very well prioritized learning queue, using the just-in-time learning concept, helping yourself with flash cards and much more.

Until then make sure you are constantly improving and learning. Just make sure you aren’t only learning, but that you are really doing validated learning.

EXAMPLES

Silos and the Traditional Enterprise

To understand validated learning and how it helps in the context of an enterprise, let’s take a look at a glaring pain point for most enterprises: silos. Silos create miniature organizations within your organization. And their motivations and goals can often become orthogonal to one another — or even conflicting. The silo problem is such an Achilles’ heel for the enterprise that celebrated management consultant Patrick Lenience wrote one of his famous business fables about the issue.

Silos are actually pretty understandable when you think about the nature of scale. A startup consists of a handful of folks fighting for their professional lives. They often keep long hours, work crazy schedules, and wear so many hats they lose track of them all. Because of this, and because their numbers are few, they form a tight, cohesive bond, all working together on everything to deliver success.

Then they start to grow. The core team becomes the management team, which then becomes the executive team in something resembling a more traditional organization. Scale like this requires systemizing the organization and establishing processes, which, in turn, leads to specialization and increasingly complex interactions.

Before you know it, you’ve got significant organizational silos. Adding a single open source tool to one of your applications requires a cross-department committee hailing from four different countries. And once you get to this point, you’re primed for a cohesive startup to come along and start eating into your market share.

An enormous influence in this direction was the Lean Startup, by Eric Ries. It’s a book and also a first-class movement of sorts. While this book was, by and large, aimed at entrepreneurs and would-be startup founders, there was also a section dedicated to the subject of “lean startups” within the enterprise. This gave rise to the neologism “intrapreneurship.”

Checking back in with the premise of feature flags in enterprise-class issue tracking software, we’re seeing a product integration that will represent a crucial tool for intrapreneurs.

The Lean Startup: A Blueprint for Success

To drive the point home, let’s consider the Lean Startup movement. We’ll take a very brief tour through how it works. This will likely cover some terms you’ve heard tossed around, possibly incorrectly at times.

To understand the lean startups, the first thing you need to do is start thinking about entrepreneurship and business through the lens of the scientific method. You observe the world and make a business-related hypothesis, such as “I think people would pay for an app that identified bird calls.” You then contrive of an experiment to reinforce or disprove this hypothesis.

Coming back to the business world and to lean startups, you can think of your experiment as your minimum viable product (MVP). A lot of people confuse the MVP with a beta version or a minimum feature set that a customer will accept. But that’s not the case. An MVP is the cheapest vehicle that you have for running an experiment.

For instance, you could put a do-nothing app into the app store that claimed it identified bird calls and see if people bought it. That’s hardly a good long-term business model, but it’s a very cheap way to confirm or disprove your hypothesis.

Validated learning is the iterative process of running such experiments and accumulating actionable business knowledge based on them. Knowing whether or not people would pay for a bird app via an actual experiment is a lot more valuable than convening a focus group or simply guessing.

Microsoft, for instance, used to ship their Visual Studio IDEs every few years. Now, they do it in a constant stream of small updates.

But it’s not just a technical matter of releasing more frequently, either. Organizations are instrumenting their software with mechanisms to capture user data. They’re employing analytics on all kinds of data to figure out weaknesses and even anticipate problems before they’re happening.

Now, if they want to keep up, they’re rolling changes out at the feature level. And they’re using their issue tracking software to see how users are responding and updating their feature priorities on the fly accordingly.

In a conclusion, we could summarize it by saying that rather than developing product with many features for too long, days and nights by consuming lots of resources on features which we think we must add initially with the assumption that it would create value for customers and ultimately customer will happily pay for it in return; Instead, we must start a loop by deploying the product to customers with minimum features, learn customer feedback, adjust the product or overall strategy accordingly and iterate the loop for validating learning by deploying it again to them as quickly as possible. This could save our effort and resources beforehand from being wastage.

Reference: “The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses Eric Ries.”

Penenberg, Adam L. (8 September 2011). “Eric Ries is a Lean Startup machine”. Fast Company. Retrieved 4 June 2015.

Adler, Carlye (30 August 2011). “Ideas are overrated: startup guru Eric Ries’ radical new theory”. Wired. Retrieved 4 June 2015.

In September 2008, Ries coined the term lean startup on his blog, Startup Lessons Learned: Ries, Eric (8 September 2008). “The lean startup”. startuplessonslearned.com. Retrieved 4 June 2015.