the lean approach

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THE LEAN APPROACH

Professor Laura Huang @LauraHuangLA


“No business plan survives first contact with customers”

-‐ Steve Blank


So how do you plan in an early-stage startup environment?

•  Conventional planning

•  A well understood and predictable platform of past experience

•  Managers can extrapolate future results from past experience

•  Managers have lots of knowledge and data at their disposal and make very few assumptions


Waterfall Development Waterfall

Requirements

Design

Implementa2on

Verifica2on

Ship


Agile


So how do you plan in an early-stage startup environment?

•  Planning for new ventures

•  Customers and markets are uncertain or unknown

•  Competitor behavior is not obvious

•  Entrepreneurs must make a large number of assumptions based on very little data and knowledge


“Lean Startups”

Agile Company Building

Customer Discovery

Customer Validation

Customer Creation


Decide on your idea

Create hypotheses

Generate MVPs PrioriDze MVPs

Pivot

Achieve Product-‐Market Fit

Start here

1

2

3

Run Tests

Lean Startups: How to do it


Decide on your idea

Create hypotheses


Pivot


Start here

1

2

3

Run Tests

Creating MVPs


Decide on your idea

Create hypotheses


Pivot


Start here

1

2

3

Run Tests

Sequence MVPs


Summary

Key points:

•  The lean approach is a method for dealing with the inherent uncertainty in entrepreneurship

•  The lean approach entails running tests on your MVP, pivoting, and achieving product-market fit

•  The basic premise of the lean approach is that entrepreneurs should be able to create more value for customers with fewer resources

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the lean approach

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