An Interest in Lean Startup Approach?

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That moments when we have that “idea” and get yourself excited believing that it will be your big break. This gets us thinking about “starting” a project and possibly building a business. This is a great feeling and it is part of the creative process. However the “passion” should be combined with a methodology, a framework, a tool that can help us evaluate, guide and measure the progress in order to build and make your dream a reality.

There are several school of thoughts that we can study and even combine together to plan for our entrepreneurial endeavors of building software products and/or services that we have envisioned.

One approach that I found very interesting in the product development business is the concept of “Lean Startup”. Below are a few points that got me interested in this subject (if you are looking for an introduction or find more info I encourage you to follow the links in our reference section), all elements part of the “Lean Startup” approach:

1. The tough and important questions that we should ask ourselves: “Can this product be built?” vs “Should this product be build?”
2. The concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP): a product that has the core features that allows the product to be deployed. You can see it as a strategy to have your product available to a subset of customers in order to get feedback. It is part of an iterative, prototyping process. 
3. Involve measurement and learning and actionable metrics that can demonstrate cause and effect questions.
4. The use of the “5 why’s”. The intention is to attack the problematic items of the idea. It is an investigate method based on asking the question “why?” five times for understanding the root cause of the problem. 
5. The “Lean Startup” has 5 principles. 2 of them I found it very:

• 3rd principle -> Validated learning: “Startup exists not to make stuff, make money or serve customers. They exist to learn how to build sustainable business. This learning can be validated scientifically by running experiments that allow us to test each element of our vision”.
• 5th principle -> build – measure – learn: “Fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate the feedback loop”.

So if you are looking to build something then remember to use a method that helps you organize, measure and get feedback. Keep it simple and "fail-fast and often". Perhaps take a look at the "Lean Startup" and see if this method can fulfill the needs of your startup.

Reference:

• The Lean Startup Principles
• Lean Series Books 
• five why's