New Book Review: "The Lean Startup"
New book review for The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, by Eric Ries, Crown Business, 2011:
Copy (uncorrected proof) provided by Amazon.
Good introduction to the application of Lean principles to the startup effort. As with its Lean ancestry in the manufacturing world, and later other areas of business such as software development, Lean seeks to eliminate any waste that does not add value to the end customer. Applied to the startup, Lean enables entrepreneurs to determine what customers want during product development to help minimize wasted efforts when rolling out products to the marketplace. As Ries states in his introduction, this is a book for entrepreneurs and the people who hold them accountable.
The five principles of the Lean Startup that are pervasive throughout this text are as follows: (1) entrepreneurs are everywhere, (2) entrepreneurship is management, (3) validated learning, (4) build-measure-learn, and (5) innovation accounting. While presenting these principles, the author first walks the reader through his vision that the products a startup builds are really experiments and that the outcome of these experiments is learning how to build a sustainable business. The author then examines the build-measure-learn feedback loop, the core of the Lean Startup model, and then turns his discussion to the growth of startups within this model.