The Lean Startup Manager
Why you need to work for someone who embraces the Lean Startup principles
Back in september of 2011 Eric Ries published a book that changed many of us deeply. Over the last few years, there’s been a lot of repercussion about the Lean Startup and how it applies to the Enterprise, Non-Profits and even to Vietnam war…
But there’s one thing I haven’t heard or read much about, that is the individual’s benefits from working with the Lean Startup principles, under the leadership of someone who embraces these principles and creates an environment where they can be learned and practiced. I’m going to call it The Lean Startup Manager.
So, here’s a list of principles and how they positively impact team members individually.
Entrepreneurs are everywhere
That means you are an entrepreneur too! Which means you will be encouraged by your manager to bring and develop ideas, identify new business opportunities, obtain and organize resources and take both the risks and the rewards of all of this.
What’s more important from an individual perspective, you’ll get massive opportunity for empirical learning.
Entrepreneurship is management
So, now that your manager considers you an entrepreneur, you know that you will be given autonomy.
If your position is such that you don’t have a team, you will still be free to manage yourself and all your incumbencies. This is what Jason Fried calls “the manager of one”. And if you do have a team assigned, you will be allowed enough freedom to manage your team your way.
Validated learning
How about working in a “dogma-free” environment? Your manager is convinced that we live in a world of “extreme uncertainty”. Everything is a hypothesis that must be tested. There’s no such thing as “this is how we do things” or “because I say so”.
Learning the process by which you define what needs to be learned, design the experiments, gather data to measure and draw conclusions is one of those skills that affects many aspect of your life, not just the work you are currently doing.
Innovation Accounting
The terms “innovation” and “accounting” are both well known and understood. However, by combining the two terms together they take on a very different meaning.
By embracing the Lean Startup principles, your manager is going beyond “vanity metrics” and focusing on metrics that really matter — those metrics that speak about cause-and-effect relationships.
Everyone deserves to work in an environment where leaders care about what’s really happening with the product and what can be done to make it better.
Build-Measure-Learn
Now you have a hypothesis, a product to build, an MVP of your better self. Go build an experiment, measure real cause-and-effect metrics about your own life and learn how much happier you can be by making this one small adjustment.
Conclusion
So, either convince your boss to change in order to embrace the Lean Startup principles OR convince yourself to change, to redirect your career. Remember that your career is your journey through learning, work and other aspects of life.
And as Steve Jobs puts it,
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.
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