Reading Order
The Lean Startup Reading Order
Eric Ries's The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (2011) introduced a framework for building companies under conditions of extreme uncertainty — replacing the traditional business plan model with a cycle of Build-Measure-Learn: rapidly building minimum viable products, measuring their actual impact on customer behavior, and learning from those measurements to decide whether to persevere or pivot.
Where to start
The Lean Startup
Complete The Lean Startup Book List
The Lean Startup — Frequently Asked Questions
What is a 'minimum viable product' in The Lean Startup?
Eric Ries defines a minimum viable product (MVP) as 'that version of the product that enables a full turn of the Build-Measure-Learn loop with a minimum amount of effort and the least amount of development time' — the smallest version of a product that can generate real feedback from real customers about the key assumptions underlying your business. An MVP is not a minimal product in the sense of being cheap or low-quality; it is precisely the product that will test the most important hypothesis as quickly as possible. The classic example is Dropbox's MVP: rather than building the product, founder Drew Houston made a simple video explaining how it would work, which drove massive sign-ups and validated customer demand before a line of product code was written.
What does it mean to 'pivot' in Lean Startup terminology?
A pivot is 'a structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth' — a change in one or more elements of the business model in response to what the Build-Measure-Learn cycle has revealed, rather than an abandonment of the enterprise. Ries identifies several types of pivots: a zoom-in pivot (a single feature becomes the whole product), a zoom-out pivot (the whole product becomes a single feature of something larger), a customer segment pivot (the product is right but for a different customer than originally envisioned), and a business architecture pivot (switching between a high-margin, low-volume model and a low-margin, high-volume model). The ability to pivot before running out of runway is the central competitive advantage of the lean startup methodology.
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