The Leader’s Guide — Eric Ries
Eric Ries on his recent kickstarter campaign to release his new book The Leader’s Guide.
Q. So why release your book only on Kickstarter? — Jeremie
I wanted to do an MVP to test out if there was really demand for The Leader’s Guide. The nice thing about Kickstarter is, if people don’t want it, you don’t have to write it.
Q. What do you think about launching an MVP for a media business? For instance, if you are launching a podcast network that is a paid-for network BUT you own and operate a bunch of free networks. Would you say those free networks serve as an MVP? Or would you still try to test the concept for the paid network? —Dain Miller
I would still try to test. My motto as your advisor would be “you’re probably right, but what could it hurt to double-check?”.
Q. What’s your favorite book on the topic of agile methodology on 100% remote teams across timezones? — CE
I don’t have a lot of experience with remote teams + agile, although I hear it is do-able. I still think the best agile book is Kent Beck’s original XP Explained and the principles are the same no matter the physical setup.
Q. What’s your favorite thing about the whole lean methodology? — Martin Bavio
TBH it kind of took me a whole book to explain that.
Q. Any advice for people trying to start user generated content communities? Amassing the following and building a community around it? Any books you could point me towards ? — Bakzfuture
There aren’t that many UGC books that I can think of that are told from the POV of the person trying to create the community. I wonder if you’d find Play Money or Synthetic Worlds helpful, although they are very game-focused and a little dated now or Amy Jo Kim’s book on community.
Q. What do you do if your customer feedback is, “I would use this if it had X”, where X is something you can’t knock off a quick/rough version of in a week or even a month? Are there times when your next learning opportunity is 1–3 months away? Feels like a long time to go in between iterations. — Jason Crawford
Hey Jason! “I would use this is if X” is one of the worst kinds of feedback, because it’s so often wrong. So let’s say you build X in three months, they may still not use it! That’s an awful feeling. Look, there are times when it takes > 3 months to get feedback on something, and that’s not something to be scared of but I think a lot of us talk ourselves into that situation when it’s really not true (I was working with consumer appliance startup recently that got their speed of iteration — in metal, plastic, and electronics — down from years to weeks).
So I suggest two things: 1) can we get the customer to make a commitment that X is really important, as in a pre-order of some kind or 2) can we get some of the benefit of X sooner using a concierge MVP or other technique to measure their real reaction to it.
Q. What company, in your opinion has most successfully adopted the principle concepts from lean startup? — Amino
I try not to take credit for any company’s success. Every year we have companies tell their own stories in their own words at the Lean Startup Conference, and I’d recommend you check out those videos (they are online for free). Incidentally, Product Hunt will be at this year’s conference.
Q. I have a question about the small shift in tone in your books. In “The Lean Startup” you lay the groundwork for a scientific process that can be learned and replicated. You’ve caused a big ripple effect in SV and the world because of this. In “The Leader’s Guide”, I get the feeling that you are trying to learn from other people and learn about their diverse experiences. Are you starting to believe in the random magic of startups once again (as opposed to the formula approach) or why the shift? — Irving Torres
I’m not sure I know what you mean. The Lean Startup (the book) uses dozens of case studies to tell the story of how those ideas work. Most of those stories were based in my own personal network and clients. I’d like to have a more diverse set of case studies this time around.
Q. My question would be around tailoring how polished an MVP should be depending on target market? Let’s say you’re building something for designers (overly critical ones) would you spend time polishing the UI and visuals so they feel you have paid attention to quality? Or should an MVP be bare bones feature wise and quality/design wise? — Creig Cranfield
If you don’t know who your customer is, you don’t know what “quality” means and the only way to learn what a customer thinks is quality is to put something in front of them that they can react to. You’d be surprised how many designers don’t care about the aesthetics of the products they use every day.
Q. Quote from Zero to One: “The buzzwords of the moment call for building a ‘lean startup’ that can ‘adapt’ and ‘evolve’ to an ever-changing environment. Would-be entrepreneurs are told that nothing can be known in advance: we’re supposed to listen to what customers say they want, make nothing more than a ‘minimum viable product,’ and iterate our way to success. But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from zero to one.” — Jason Crawford
I get asked about that quote all the time. I couldn’t agree more with this: “But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from zero to one.” I don’t understand why some people think saying “Lean Startup is (just) a methodology” is a criticism or insult. Part one of my book is called Vision for a reason — you can’t do science without a good hypothesis. Now the idea that I advocate that “nothing can be known in advance” etc is a bit of a strawman but you know how Peter likes his rhetorical flourishes.
Q. How do you recommend applying lean startup philosophies in hardware environments when chipset design has multiple month and high capital investments? — Sarkar
Same as as in software: try to learn as quickly as possible. In some businesses, the MVP can take years and millions of dollars.
Q. Have you considered writing for companies that are beyond the lean startup point in their life cycle? when do you stop being lean? — Amino
Yes, that is a big part of the new book — what happens when you get post product/market fit.
Q. Are there any books beyond “the inmates are running the asylum” you would recommend for understanding how to design better ux, mvp style? — Tasha
I love that book. There are now several “lean ux” books including “Lean UX” and “UX for Lean Startups” that are excellent on that questions.
Q. Any advice on honing one’s long term vision for a startup company? And concentrating that into a high impact MVP? Balance between long and short term strategic thinking — Bakztfuture
Great question to end on. There’s a real paradox of startups, which is that having a long-term vision requires short-term action and experimentation without the long-term vision, all that experimentation leads to running around in circles and, ironically, having a short-term outlook leads to slow and plodding waterfall development — just ask (almost) any public company. So to me, the key thing for strategy to answer is: what are the key hypotheses that are required to make this long-term outcome happen. Once you can do that, you can target experiments to test those hypotheses. Too much strategizing happens at the whiteboard, IMO.
From Product Hunt Directly on day of kickstarter launch:
Q. Why do you write and speak about lean startup principles? I realize this is a broad question but I’m curious to hear your answer? — Ryan Hoover
I ask myself that question on a pretty regular basis, tbh. Remember, I used to be an engineer and I still love writing code more than just about anything else (although I don’t get to do it very often anymore — after a while, Project Euler exercises just don’t cut it). Traveling and speaking as much as I do now is not something I ever thought I’d be doing professionally.
I remember two really clear moments in my career that come back to me whenever I think about this question. One is from when I was still at IMVU. Believe it or not, a lot of the Lean Startup ideas that are today considered obvious and maybe even a little dated were controversial back then. And there was no Lean Startup movement to get your back if you advocated for them. I was going into a board meeting with my cofounders and VCs during a time when our startup was not doing that well. It was kind of a tense situation, and a lot of the discussion was going to be about whether our “wacky” way of building the product was to blame.
The clear thing that everyone wanted me to do was to compromise and propose to the board that we back off the “lean” stuff just a little bit. Slow down, get more “professional,” be less experimental. So I agonized over that meeting. I knew there was a real chance that if I stuck to my guns it might be the end of my time as CTO. Certainly it meant a long series of challenging conversations.
So I asked myself: even if I get fired, what do I want to be remembered for? And I thought about all of my friends who were (even then) founders of companies. And all the talented people I had worked with who were trapped in waterfall product teams wasting their life building products nobody wanted. I really felt the waste of it all. And I felt like I had a chance to strike a tiny little blow for what was right.
It was no sure thing that it would work out, and to this day I am grateful to my cofounders and investors for sticking with me.
I tell this long story, because the same image popped into my mind years later. The first time I was invited to give a talk about Lean Startup, I was backstage a few minutes before the talk feeling sick to my stomach. I was really asking myself, “WTF are you doing here?” The room was packed with 10X more people than I expected, and I was super nervous.
And I was literally in the bathroom in the back of the Moscone center trying to breathe. And I asked myself Ryan’s question again: why are you really here? And I thought, what if even one person in this audience is a founder, and they hear what I have to say, and when they are going into that board meeting to stand for what’s right, they feel like they have an ally? That they are a little better prepared? Even one founder would be enough to make it worthwhile. And that’s when I calmed down and took the stage.
Q. Aside from your books, what are your must reads? — Ben Halpern
I love books & I love reading. I already listed a lot of my favorite business/startup books in the last section of The Lean Startup, so I won’t repeat myself here.
I’m recently obsessed with Ancillary Justice by @annleckie, very original sci-fi that will make you see the world in a new way. BTW, I think @pmarca’s sci-fi list has aged really well (I read through the whole thing a few years ago):
It’s hard to pick out anything as a “must” read, because books have the most impact when they come into your life at the right time. For me, a number of authors have steered my life onto a new path: Neal Stephenson, Clay Christentsen, Kent Beck, Taichii Ohno, even Ayn Rand. (Steve Blank, obviously, but I knew him personally before I read his book)
Q. Why use Kickstarter and give up a percentage of sales? You already have a large audience that will buy anything you write so validating demand is less of a need, I assume. — Ryan Hoover
I had a similar thoughts to Ryan Hoover. Surely a more straight forward “tim ferris” style book launch would have been just as effective/more effective. — Ben Aldred
Been there, done that: http://www.startuplessonslearned...
I wanted to try something new, see what I could learn about launching a book in 2015. The Kickstarter % doesn’t bother me, since the campaign isn’t really about the money.
“Eric Ries is running one of the most successful publishing campaigns in Kickstarter’s history.” — Bloomberg Business
“On Monday, Ries began work on his next book project. Fittingly, he started it off with a Kickstarter campaign. The campaign achieved its $135,000 fundraising goal on Tuesday, and by Thursday morning Ries had more than $170,000 in pledges.” — Vox
“Ries turned to Kickstarter as an experiment in research, writing, and marketing. He didn’t want to write in a vacuum.” — Fast Company
The Leader’s Guide is no longer available. The Kickstarter campaign has now expired: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/881308232/only-on-kickstarter-the-leaders-guide-by-eric-ries/description
The Leader’s Guide is aimed at entrepreneurs, executives, or anyone leading a project or team. It will be full of stories about how companies both large and small are adopting Lean Startup methods to scale successfully and operate in conditions of extreme uncertainy.
The Leader’s Guide is for both those who are new to Lean Startup as well as those who love the methodology in principle, but want to know more about how to put it into practice. It will include lots of real-world examples about how entrepreneurs are tackling questions like:
How can I convince my team that testing our early ideas with customers does not mean they should sacrifice quality or forget about our vision?
How can I convince senior leadership that innovation projects require a different system of accounting?
How can I do Lean Startup-style experimentation in a highly-regulated industry?
How can I incentivize and reward my team for working in a cross-functional way?
How can we turn functional specialists in areas like IT, HR and finance into allies when it comes to supporting new ideas?
I think of The Leader’s Guide as a kind of master class in applying the Lean Startup methodology. I can’t possibly work with all the companies who ask for help, but I can do my best to translate the work I do into book form. The Leader’s Guide will also answer some of the most frequently-asked questions and dispel the myths surrounding the Lean Startup, as well as include tips and tricks from people who’ve been using the method successfully.
So if you’re just discovered The Lean Startup, you’re a practitioner who wants a deeper dive, or you’re at a company trying to incorporate it at scale, this is a great next step.
The Leader’s Guide in both its hardcover and digital formats will ship to backers in late 2015.
