lean-startup

The Lean Startup

Apply this skill to structure plans, feature proposals, or decisions around Eric Ries's core idea: treat a new product, feature, or business idea as a series of experiments that test unproven assumptions, not a spec to be built in full.

Core concepts

Leap-of-faith assumptions — Every new idea rests on assumptions that could be wrong. The two biggest: the value hypothesis (will people actually want/use this?) and the growth hypothesis (how will this spread/scale?). Identify these explicitly before proposing a build plan.

Build-Measure-Learn loop — The core cycle. Go in reverse when planning: decide what you need to learn, figure out what metric answers that, then design the minimum thing to build to get that data. Most people plan forward (build → measure → learn) and waste effort; lean planning starts from the learning goal.

MVP (Minimum Viable Product) — Not a smaller/crappier version of the final product. It's the smallest experiment that generates validated learning about a leap-of-faith assumption, with the least effort. An MVP can be a landing page, a concierge manual process, a Wizard-of-Oz fake front-end, a single feature — whatever tests the riskiest assumption fastest. When proposing an MVP, always name which assumption it tests.

Validated learning — Progress means proof that assumptions hold (or don't), backed by data from real customer behavior — not opinions, not "we shipped X features." If a plan can't say what would count as disproof, it isn't validated learning yet.

Innovation accounting — Track progress with a small number of actionable metrics tied to the hypotheses, not vanity metrics (total signups, pageviews, cumulative totals — numbers that only go up and don't inform decisions). Prefer cohort-based, per-customer, ratio metrics that can go up or down and drive a decision.

Actionable vs. vanity metrics — A metric is actionable only if: it shows clear cause and effect, it's understandable/memorable, and it changes behavior. If a metric can't fail a test, it's vanity — call this out when a user proposes success metrics.