Adopting Lean Startup practices - 4 principles

I’ve been an avid reader of Eric Ries’s and Steve Blank’s book/blogs for quite some time now. Their approaches for startup development are closely aligned and IMHO offer entrepreneurs great tips and tools to make their startup a resounding success. BTW, I was also privileged to attend Eric’s Lean Startup workshop recently and so I’m a very keen supporter of the changes he and others are looking to bring to the industry.

I have during this period (18 months) tried to adopt these approaches within the companies I’ve been advising to varying degrees of success. I’ve particularly tried to focus my efforts on how a product manager or the product management function within an organization can use some of these lessons to adapt their internal development and external sales processes. Within a small startup this is relatively easy once you have the buy-in of the main stakeholders which will probably be the founders. But, within a startup where you don’t necessarily have the support of the founding team or within a larger organization this change may be more difficult.

However, despite these challenges, I think it’s a worthwhile avenue to pursue. Let’s face it - we all want to be involved in a successful organization and perhaps be the next facebook or twitter. So if your initiative can help your company be more successful then you have the obligation to try. Either way you’ll learn a lot along the way.

To help you along here are the 4 basic principles that I’ve learned/relied on in pursuing my Lean goals:

1. Be patient: it may take time but if you take a slowly but surely approach the powers that be will see the light
2. Engagement is key: don’t ram it down peoples throats, prove the case for small changes first by showing within your own remit how it works
3. Keep it simple: a lot of the changes that are recommended in these approaches are not that different from what you do today but have a different feel so start by making some small adjustments to your current processes
4. Product Management Hub: holds the company together and it’s where the crucial decisions about product, pricing, etc. are made - you can potentially have a lot of impact within your organization (albeit gradual)

Like some of you perhaps, when I had read Steve’s book and listened to some of what he and Eric had to say I tried to rush in head first to adopt everything asap. Needless to day this did not work. So, after some months of frustration, one of my previous companies needed to take a different approach. That’s when things began to gel a little bit better - my conversations started to become more like the Problem and Solution Teams that the Lean Startup methodology promotes. (More about this in later posts.) Therefore, I’d caution you to look for that opportunity in your companies and use the “hub” like status of product management to become the instigator of change.

You don’t have to call it what it is for it to be what it is - does that make sense? Perhaps not - for example, if you want to convene a Solution team meeting to discuss what you have found out from the Problem team, don’t call it such if those monikers are not understood or accepted. Call your standard product meeting with the Design/Engineering/QA/Product group (the Solution team) but use it to highlight the issues that Sales/Biz Dev/Marketing/Product (the Problem team) have raised.

Remember - don’t give up on trying to convince the founding team of the benefits on these methods! But in the meantime you can still make some progress yourself and demonstrate some of the benefits.