Book Review: The Lean Startup

ISBN:9780008247669

Eric Ries(2011)

The book is a guide to folks in the startup fraternity emphasising the doctrines of innovation to build sustainable businesses.

The author has thoughtfully fragmented the chapters into parts like vision, steer and accelerate further breaking them to actionable items to comprehend every part’s objective. It advocates on how important it is for startups to not just measure them by revenue or customer base but to validate their learnings scientifically by running experiments, iterating the core product which allows them to test their vision over a course of time.

Interesting triptych of the book is Build-Measure-Learn loop and the diagram is self-explanatory on how startups need to focus on building the right product/code(solution to a problem) →Measure using the data, the book in general also highlights time and again about the complexities involved in understanding consumer mindset → Learn from the ideas by being customer-centric and pivot at every stage understanding the dynamics.

Accordingly, the four questions that every startup entrepreneur may want to brainstorm with their team while ideating are,

• Is the consumer problem real?
• Is the solution offered worth buying?
• Are we the best in the market?
• do we have the capacity to build the solution for the problem?

The case studies makes the inference easy to register and recall.

The author preaches working in small batches and how time, expenditure and effort saving this can be for startups. And also claims that root of every seeming tech problem is a human problem unearthed by the “wisdom of five whys” and seems quite an easy task to master however the caveat of this virtue is that it may turn into a blame game when not exercised properly. The aptest example of Taiichi Ohno's stint as Engineer in Toyota gives us the idea on how to exercise this virtue with the help of a moderator.

The book’s principles and ideologies as per the author is not a fail-proof to make any startup work but unveils the fact that science(experiment in this case) is one of humanity’s most creative pursuits and applying the same would most certainly unlock a vast storehouse of human potential.