When you have limited resources, as a scrappy bootstrapped start-up does, lean becomes both a way of life and an asset. Even when you become well-funded, to stay ahead of the competition and keep your customers satisfied, it's important to remember the value of iterating on your product and learning quickly.
One example that illustrates how to build lean products is to imagine building a car. You can do this a couple of different ways:
- You can toil away for months or years with your team making this car according to the specifications you've drawn out beforehand. Then once you finish, you deliver the completed product to your customer. But what's the likelihood that you've built something the customer loves? Because you haven't talked to them during the building process, it's pretty low. Not talking with customers throughout the design and building process is one of the most common mistakes first-time founders make. It's not hard to understand why: founders don't want to show the product to their customers until their product is 100% complete because they worry about risking their brand. But you waste precious time not getting feedback from your customer if you wait until the product is finished.
- "Alright, fine!" you say, "I won't wait until my product is complete before getting customer feedback." You instead go about starting to build your car. You make the tire, then the wheel axle, then the car frame, then the car. You request customer feedback at each stage. But the customer doesn't know what to do with your tire, wheel axle, or frame. It's not something they can use, so they can't provide any helpful feedback.
[Henrik Kniberg (https://blog.crisp.se/2016/01/25/henrikkniberg/making-sense-of-mvp)](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/dc6bbeff-53fa-45d1-9661-167fbeaa7aac/untitled)
Henrik Kniberg (https://blog.crisp.se/2016/01/25/henrikkniberg/making-sense-of-mvp)
- Instead, the lean approach is to solve the customer's problem from our very first version. Why does the customer need a car? Let's assume we interviewed them, and they told us they need to be able to get from point A to point B faster than walking. Great! One solution is to give them a skateboard and then get their feedback. We've learned from their feedback that they feel unbalanced on a skateboard, so in the next iteration, we go back to them with a scooter, followed by a bicycle, then a motorcycle, and finally landing on a car. The customer will most likely be unhappy with the early iterations, but at least they can use it and give you feedback. It's a simplistic example, but the point is that you iterate your way to a complex solution, trying to be better at solving the customer's problem in each version, based on the customer feedback from the previous solution.
📚 Reference