Eric Ries Quotes

Startups struggle to see their work-in-progress inventory. When factories have excess WIP, it literally piles up on the factory floor. Because most startup work is intangible, it’s not nearly as visible. For example, all the work that goes into designing the minimum viable product is — until the moment that product is shipped — just WIP inventory. Incomplete designs, not-yet-validated assumptions, and most business plans are WIP. Almost every Lean Startup technique we’ve discussed so far works its magic in two ways: by converting push methods to pull and reducing batch size. Both have the net effect of reducing WIP.

In fact, I believe a company’s only sustainable path to long-term economic growth is to build an “innovation factory” that uses Lean Startup techniques to create disruptive innovations on a continuous basis.

We do everything wrong: instead of spending years perfecting our technology, we build a minimum viable product, an early product that is terrible, full of bugs and crash-your-computer-yes-really stability problems. Then we ship it to customers way before it’s ready. And we charge money for it. After securing initial customers, we change the product constantly — much too fast by traditional standards — shipping new versions of our product dozens of times every single day.

The Lean Startup works only if we are able to build an organization as adaptable and fast as the challenges it faces.

learning” is the oldest excuse in the book for a failure of execution.

Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.

the business and marketing functions of a startup should be considered as important as engineering and product development and therefore deserve an equally rigorous methodology to guide them.

there is no bigger destroyer of creative potential than the misguided decision to persevere.

The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.

For the growth hypothesis, which tests how new customers will discover a product or service, we can do a similar analysis.

we could reduce the failure rate by doing fewer projects of higher quality. Others believe that certain people have an innate gift of knowing the right thing to build. If we can find enough of these visionaries and virtuosos, our problems will be solved. These “solutions” were once considered state of the art in the nineteenth century, too, before people knew about modern management.

A cultura é memória muscular institucional, que não se baseia em como a organização aspira a atuar, mas em como realmente atuou no passado.

If a competitor can outexecute a startup once the idea is known, the startup is doomed anyway. The reason to build a new team to pursue an idea is that you believe you can accelerate through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop faster than anyone else can.

The more specific the symptoms are, the easier it will be for everyone to recognize when it’s time to schedule a Five Whys meeting.

As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.