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The Lean Startup¶

Ries, E. (2011). The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Crown.

Type: Book
Intellectual base: Review or monograph
Year: 2011
Link: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/210088/the-lean-startup-by-eric-ries/
Cited from: art_aesthetics, computer_science, human_computer_interaction, innovation_entrepreneurship, organizational_management, systems_cybernetics

Cited by¶

10 citations across 10 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes¶

Adaptive Redirection
- Adaptive redirection is the response to evidence that turns against a course of action: the agent selects a materially different course, holds the objective fixed across the change, and deliberately makes something the failed course produced — knowledge, capability, tooling, data, relationships — do load-bearing work on the new path.
  This sourceDefines the pivot as a change of strategy under an overarching vision that rarely changes, keeping validated learning from the abandoned strategy in play.
Gall's Law
- In lean-startup and venture methodology, the minimum-viable-product doctrine is Gall's Law made operational: every release must be a working product, however minimal, and the chain of releases is the growth path.
  This sourceOperationalizes the minimum-viable-product doctrine — every release must be a working product, however minimal — as Gall's Law applied to ventures.
Minimalism
- Lean management and MVP (Minimum Viable Product): launching with core features only, testing assumptions with minimal resource commitment (Ries 2011
Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
- Mature understanding recognizes MVP not as hastily-launched defective product but as disciplined hypothesis-testing discipline: clear about what assumptions you're testing, what minimal feature set tests those assumptions, what feedback you'll gather, and how you'll interpret results
Premature Optimization
- Second, an early-stage company hardening formal processes, org hierarchy, and OKR metrics around an unvalidated business hypothesis.
  This sourceArgues against hardening processes and metrics around an unvalidated business hypothesis before product-market fit, using disposable experiments during search.
Tempo Mismatch
- In business a release cadence longer than the competitive iteration cycle ships features against requirements that have changed, while a cadence shorter than the customer's adoption timescale produces churn that customers cannot absorb.
Wizard Of Oz Prototyping
- Organisational pilots and process design — a new internal process is run with manual handoffs and spreadsheets before the system that will automate it is specified.
  This sourceDefines the 'concierge' and 'Wizard of Oz' MVP patterns — an apparently automated product with a manual back end — and the build-measure-learn staged-commitment discipline for validating demand before building, including running a process manually before automating it.

Domain-specific¶

Customer-Discovery Theater
- Naming the theater pulls apart three things that the phrase "we did customer discovery" otherwise fuses into one reassuring claim. Confirmatory inquiry seeks evidence for the hypothesis — methodologically weak, but still responsive if the contradiction is loud enough. Disconfirmatory inquiry is framed to surface what would kill the hypothesis — the posture the methodologies (Lean Startup, Design Thinking, JTBD) intend
  This sourceRies's method supplies the disconfirmation-permitting posture — validated learning, build-measure-learn and the pivot-or-persevere decision — for Lean Startup only, not for Design Thinking or Jobs-to-be-Done.

Mechanisms¶

Aging Dashboard
- A dashboard with no treatment-changing rule behind it is a vanity metric — it produces the feeling of managing the tail while nothing actually moves, the visibility-as-theatre failure the archetype warns against.
Scent Clickthrough Trace Dashboard
- Its defining trap is optimizing the proxy instead of the goal: clickthrough is seductive precisely because it is easy to move, and a team that celebrates rising clicks without checking arrival is chasing vanity metrics — numbers that look like progress but do not track the outcome that matters.
  This sourceShows how vanity metrics can present a rosy picture of progress while failing to track the outcome that matters.

Verification¶

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Links previously used in the corpus¶

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