Book review: The lean startup, how constant innovation creates radically successful businesses

Just finished ‘The lean startup, how constant innovation creates radically successful businesses’ by Eric Ries. This is one of the books that was used in creating the PRINCE2 Agile framework. In my previous post I gave an overview of this new PRINCE2 Agile framework. See PRINCE2 Agile, a first overview.

PRINCE2 Agile briefly explains the lean startup and the usage of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Lean startup follows the Build-Measure-Learn cycle and is a good example of agility. The book focuses on entrepreneurs and helps you to set up a new business. The philosophy can easily be applied in your projects to find out if you understand your customer correctly by creating a hypothesis and model, build a MVP and test. The sooner you fail with your test the earlier you can learn from what you have done and adapt.

I created a one-page overview (to download: Lean startup (QRC, 150717) v1.0). The MPV can have many forms. Be aware that the MPV is not necessarily the smallest product imaginable (minimum usable product). It can be a simple video, a concierge model, a smoke or split test, or an early prototype and many more. Make sure the MVP helps you to learn and keep it as simple as possible. The faster you can start testing, the better. After analysing the results you have to decide to pivot (the test fails so you have to change the MVP or change your vision and leaps of faith) or to persevere.

The book is divided in three parts. Part one: Vision, part two: Steer and part three: Accelerate. The final chapter in the book is titled Join the movement. It contains many references to interesting websites/blogs and required and future reading.