“I’m skeptical of all lean startup methodology”
In Stanford’s how to start a startup class, Peter Thiel was asked what he thought of lean startups. He answered:
I’m personally quite skeptical of all the lean startup methodology. I think the really great companies did something that was somewhat more of a quantum improvement that really differentiated them from everybody else.
I was a bit surprised by the answer, because as an UX designer I’ve been taught the lean approach, especially if I’m designing for users who are not like me. I’ve read The Lean Startup, The Business Model Canvas, and all those UX blog posts to believe the idea that this is an approach that mitigates risk and that everyone should be doing, that it is “correct.”
Well perhaps it is just one approach of many under a toolbelt.
I remember when I was a designer-in-training (hah! like 8 months ago), I talked someone who was working at Medium at the time, and I asked how their design process was, if they took an iterative approach. And she said something like (I’m paraphrasing here):
Not really. That’s because certain ideas can’t be found in an iterative approach… look at Twitter for instance. How could you have “user researched” that?
That’s true. We still don’t know why hell Twitter is successful. We can arguable say it satisfies some deep human need for social interaction, social acceptance, or whatever. Facebook too. Needs like this, buried deeply in our subconscious are incredibly hard to observe. Even working in hindsight, I can’t imagine how I could have done user research to obtain the answers or observations from people that would lead me to build Twitter or Facebook. I believe for these ideas to come into fruition, it must be driven by a problem that’s been experienced by the founder first-hand.
I guess what I’m saying is, that if you’re going to be a founder, you need to have an intuitive understanding of the problem, at least in the early stages. You’ve got to be able to predict user behavior and build a solution with minimal user research. And when you talk to users and make observations to iterate, your intuition must help you make greater leaps than some average designer using a generic UX process would be able to.
And I think if the startup survives and grow, lean methodology becomes increasingly more valuable as you begin to design for different personas and more nuanced problems. And then you must rely on a process if you’re designing for use-cases or people you don’t intuitively understand.
But at the birth of a startup, founders can’t rely on lean alone. You must have internalized the problem and be able to rapidly build a foundation.
If you can’t, perhaps you’ve founded the wrong company.
——
