The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses Hardcover – September 13, 2011

The Lean Startup is often recommended to entrepreneurs—but its core message is universal: test, learn, adapt.As someone who works with families, professionals, and organizations navigating conflict and complexity, I found myself constantly drawing parallels between Ries’s framework and the systems I’ve been building in the co-parenting space.Ries challenges you to stop building based on what you think people need and start validating solutions through real feedback loops. That’s not just a business principle—it’s a mindset shift that changes how we approach relationships, systems, and change itself.This book helped me refine how I build programs, respond to real-time needs, and create solutions that are sustainable, not just shiny. If you work in human-centered design, systems change, education, family services—or anywhere uncertainty is your norm—this book is gold.The Lean Startup isn’t just about startups. It’s about building anything that matters—with intention, feedback, and a willingness to pivot when needed.

Book was purchased as "used" at a fraction of original price, but was in pristine condition - I'm not sure it was every used by previous owner. Shipping time was fast.

This book is a good introduction to the Lean Startup approach to building and launching products for new markets. This book draws upon numerous works that have addressed the dynamics of new markets, discovering what customers really want, fact-based decision making and lean manufacturing. What is interesting is the way Lean Startup brings these ideas together into a cohesive and powerful framework. A framework built around a fundamental insight: building a new products for a new market should be considered a high risk experiment. Or rather, a series of experiments that successively prove (or disprove) whether we are building products that customers actually want. So, make assumptions explicit, test them vigorously, learn, repeat. Iterate through this loop as quickly as possible by deploying cross functional teams that build the product in small batches.I have launched new products at startups and established companies. I have lived through the dysfunction of silo-ed teams guessing what customers want and then investing in long development cycles before they find out the truth, if ever. So personally, I find Lean Startup ideas appealing and at least worth attempting.Teams that have gone through the process of adopting agile and lean for software engineering will recognize many of the rationales and principles laid out on this book. They will also realize that they implemented those principles too narrowly to be truly effective. Limiting lean and agile practices to just product engineering does not solve the dysfunction in other areas that are equally important for market success.My concern is whether this approach will doom teams to only make small incremental improvements that can be readily tested. Will it stifle intuition and courage to make big, bold decisions? Will 'let's test it' become a crutch for people who don't have the guts to make a call based on incomplete information (and information needed for big decisions will always be incomplete)? Time will tell. The Lean Startup movement is still in it's early days.I should point out that the book lacks specific ideas on how to implement the Lean Startup approach. The book has several high level stories, but very few methods, techniques and practices that can be readily implemented. This can be a bit frustrating if you are trying to imagine what Lean Startup ideas look like in action. Ries explains why specifics are missing at the very end of the book. The Lean Startup approach itself is an experiment! It is in its early stages and there is a lot of learning needed to implement it in a repeatable fashion. Further, the emphasis on learning means that any existing method should be continuously questioned, improved or even transformed. Ries says he does not want the movement to be reduced to a set of prescribed methods and tactics. Instead, he recommends joining a community of practitioners to learn how to implement Lean Startup ideas.Another ding against this book is a chapter on how established companies can nurture innovation. Ries feels out of his element on this topic and puts forth a series of that either value or akin to motherhood and apple pie. But it doesn't matter, because this book is really for technology start-ups. And for them it does put forth some fundamentally insightful ideas that will make any entrepreneur pause and reconsider the traditional approach.

Lean Startup is a well-written book with a lot of fresh ideas and thinking about start-ups and entrepreneurship. Eric Ries, author of the book, has had a fair share of start-up experience and in his last start-up (IMVU) experimented with a lot of non-standard ways of managing start-ups influenced by Steve Blank and the Toyota Production System (or lean and hence Lean Startup).The book is divided in 3 parts which roughly map to 'phases' of start-ups: 1) vision, 2) steer, and 3) accelerate. Each of these parts is divided in 4 chapters each simply named with one word such as "Test" or "Measure" (not incredibly descriptive).The first part is called Vision and defines Lean Start-up and its influences. It explains how start-ups are about validated learning and how the optimization of start-ups needs to be about how fast they go through the build-measure-learn cycle. When starting a new product, the first thing you need to get is feedback on the product, so it is important to get a Minimum Viable Product out as quickly as possible as learning about how to use the product is a lot more powerful than research or asking customers.The second part continues with the Minimum Viable Product and the learning. The learning we'll need to get from the product is whether our business assumptions (leap-of-faith assumptions) were in fact correct. Start-ups need to change their accounting system to measure their progress in validated learning. When there is enough learning, they can check their leap-of-faith assumption and make the decision to pivot (change a bit in one direction) or persevere (continue).The last part (accelerate) first covers small batches, one of the basic concepts behind lean start-up and then explores the different "engine of growth" that companies have and stress to focus on one of these. After that it gives Eric's perspective on building lasting companies that continue to improve. The author shared his adaptation of the five why technique. It ends with some general discussion about innovation in larger companies.The epilogue contains a surprisingly positive perspective on the principled of scientific management from Fredrick Taylor.All in all, I enjoyed the book quite a lot, especially the first 2 parts. The way the author has weaved a bunch of concepts together into one holistic framework is quite nice and very concrete. It is not easy to manage your company the way the author suggests as it requires a lot of discipline and introspection (both lacking in many companies). But the Lean Startup moves us away from the black art of startups and creates an interesting structure, or at least perspective, to starting up new ventures. Recommended reading.

Love it

Una muy completa guía para aquellos que desean adquirir una visión amplia del desarrollo de Startups mediante el uso de las técnicas modernas de producción.