Eric Ries Quotes

Departments too often spend their energy learning how to use data to get what they want rather than as genuine feedback to guide their future actions.

A pivot is not just an exhortation to change. Remember, it is a special kind of structured change designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, business model, and engine of growth. It is the heart of the Lean Startup method. It is what makes the companies that follow Lean Startup resilient in the face of mistakes: if we take a wrong turn, we have the tools we need to realize it and the agility to find another path.

For a report to be considered actionable, it must demonstrate clear cause and effect. Otherwise, it is a vanity metric. The reports that Grockit’s team began to use to judge their learning milestones made it extremely clear what actions would be necessary to replicate the results.

When startups start to run low on cash, they can extend the runway two ways: by cutting costs or by raising additional funds. But when entrepreneurs cut costs indiscriminately, they are as liable to cut the costs that are allowing the company to get through its Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop as they are to cut waste. If the cuts result in a slowdown to this feedback loop, all they have accomplished is to help the startup go out of business more slowly.

But large inventories are expensive because they have to be transported, stored, and tracked.

This is the same problem that established companies experience. Their past successes were built on a finely tuned engine of growth. If that engine runs its course and growth slows or stops, there can be a crisis if the company does not have new startups incubating within its ranks that can provide new sources of growth. Companies of any size can suffer from this perpetual affliction. They need to manage a portfolio of activities, simultaneously tuning their engine of growth and developing new sources of growth for when that engine inevitably runs its course.

Pero las startups tienen la ventaja de ser oscuras, tener un número de clientes patéticamente pequeño y no ser demasiado conocidas. Más que lamentarse por ello, estas ventajas pueden usarse para experimentar sin ser detectadas y entonces hacer un lanzamiento público cuando el producto ya ha sido probado con clientes reales.[24]

Most important, a disciplined team can experiment with its own working style and draw meaningful conclusions.

I consoled myself that if we hadn’t built this first product — mistakes and all — we never would have learned these important insights about customers. We never would have learned that our strategy was flawed. There is truth in this excuse: what we learned during those critical early months set IMVU on a path that would lead to our eventual breakout success. For a time, this “learning” consolation made me feel better, but my relief was short-lived. Here’s the question that bothered me most of all: if the goal of those months was to learn these important insights about customers, why did it take so long? How much of our effort contributed to the essential lessons we needed to learn? Could we have learned those lessons earlier if I hadn’t been so focused on making the product “better” by adding features and fixing bugs?

Most of the time customers don’t know what they want in advance.)

Do consumers recognize that they have the problem you are trying to solve? 2. If there was a solution, would they buy it? 3. Would they buy it from us? 4. Can we build a solution for that problem?

startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

«Si yo eligiera un empleado al azar de cualquier nivel, departamento o región, y ese empleado tuviera una idea absolutamente brillante que abriera una fuente de crecimiento radicalmente nueva, ¿qué tendría que hacer para llevar su idea a la práctica? ¿Dispone la empresa de las herramientas de gestión necesarias para ampliar esa idea a fin de que genere el máximo impacto, aun cuando no se ajuste a ninguna de las líneas de negocio actuales?

definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

A few years ago, a team that sells products to large media companies invited me to help them as a consultant because they were concerned that their engineers were not working hard enough. However, the fault was not in the engineers; it was in the process the whole company was using to make decisions. They had customers but did not know them very well. They were deluged with feature requests from customers, the internal sales team, and the business leadership. Every new insight became an emergency that had to be addressed immediately. As a result, long-term projects were hampered by constant interruptions. Even worse, the team had no clear sense of whether any of the changes they were making mattered to customers. Despite the constant tuning and tweaking, the business results were consistently mediocre.