Category: Books

Le Lean Startup en 5 citations

Voici 5 citations choisies d’Eric Ries pour capturer les idées derrière le concept de Lean Startup. Ces citations sont du extraite du livre, “Lean Startup“.

Le succès, ce n’est pas livrer une fonctionnalité. Le succès, c’est apprendre comment résoudre le problème du client.

On célébre quand une fonctionnalité sort car elle représente le travail d’une équipe. Mais c’est pas pour autant que le client va l’utilisée. Comprendre si elle apporte une solution au problème du client, ca c’est a célébrer.

La seule façon de réussir est d’apprendre plus vite que les autres

Une startup réussi lorsque elle a trouvé un business modèle qui lui permet de créer, livrer et capturer de la valeur chez ces clients. Pour trouver ce business modèle, il faut chercher, explorer et apprendre ce qui marche et ce qui ne marche pas. Plus on apprend vite, plus on a des chances de trouver ce business modèle. Et et donc… la seule façon de réussir et d’apprendre plus vite que les autres.

Si tu ne peux pas te planter, tu ne peux pas apprendre.

Pour apprendre ce qui marche, il faut essayer ce qui marche pas. Se tromper, encore et encore jusqu’à ce que en s’améliorant à chaque tentative, on arrive ce qui marche. Cet apprentissage est au coeur du modèle Lean Startup.

Un bon design est celui qui change pour le mieux le comportement des clients

Face a un design on a très vite des options et des préférences. On aime ou pas. Mais la seule vérité c’est celle du client et de son comportement. Est-ce que fasse a ce nouveau design, les comportements des clients. Cela se test sur internet simplement avec des tests A/B.

En cas de doute, simplifier.

What else?

Je vous recommande la lecture du livre complet, disponible chez amazon.

Pourquoi lire Lean Startup d’Eric Ries?

Le livre Lean Startup d’Eric Ries a transformé l’entrepreneuriat et l’innovation.

Eric Ries, entrepreneur de la Silicon Valley, tire les leçons des échecs et réussites des startups. Il en extrait les principes fondamentaux qui permettent aux startups de réussir. En les nommant et en les codifiant, ses principes deviennent tangibles, compréhensibles et transmissibles.

Concrètement, le Lean Startup explique comment penser son produit avec le minimum de fonctionnalités pour éviter de construire un produit inutile, et comment, à partir de ce point de départ, itérer rapidement : c’est à dire construire et tester de nouvelles fonctionnalités pour comprendre ce que les clients utilisent vraiment.

Le Lean Startup transpose les concepts du lean management au contexte d’incertitude extrême dans lequel se trouve une startup. Dans un processus d’innovation, où est le gaspillage ? Comment faire de l’amélioration continue et être sûr que l’on concentre ses efforts sur de la création de valeur pour le client ? Le Lean Startup prend son sens lorsque l’on cherche à découvrir ce que l’on doit construire pour répondre aux besoins des clients.

Pour les entrepreneurs, le Lean Startup, c’est une approche scientifique et des outils pratiques pour développer leur projet.

Pour les responsables produits et marketing de grandes entreprises, le Lean Startup permet de concevoir et tester de nouvelles offres, avec des données concrètes du terrain.

Dans son livre, Eric illustre ses principes par des exemples vécus personnellement, mais aussi par d’autres entreprises de la Silicon Valley.

Ce livre est devenu maintenant une référence; à l’origine d’un véritable mouvement de fond dans le monde du business. L’approche Lean Startup a transformé plusieurs entreprises en les rendant plus rapides, agiles et centrées sur le client, comme entre autre General Electric à travers son programme FastWorks.

Eric Ries entre en 2015 dans le top Thinker 50 au côtés de Michael Porter et Clayton Christensen.

The Waterfall Startup

How wise entrepreneurs embrace the predictable outcome of their vision to build innovations.

A new groundbreaking methodology to create predictable outcome in chaotic situations.

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Pre-order now (via twitter)

Predicted publication date Dec. 2019

Build it and they will come.

This adage has now been proven for centuries: the pyramids, air planes, the Eiffel tower, Disney Land, Dubai, Las Vegas. Built it and they will come. Customer crave for new things pushed with good marketing. Good marketing will sell any well built product.

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The best way to go from A to B

A clear and linear process, that go get your from point A to point B. With an unbeatable certainty.
Not an iterative process that makes you turn around in circles and leaves you where you started.
With the waterfall startup, you are actually making clear, visible and trackable progress. Toward your goal (point B).

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Requirement-Design-Development-Verification-Maintenance Line

Define the requirement, then design your product, then develop it, verify the quality of your product, launch and enter maintenance mode. If you do it right, marketing and sales will take over the startup will succeed.

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Deliver fully finished products

Customers hate prototypes. The Waterfall Startup allows you to control the quality of your product according to your standards and only release your product to your first customer when 100% of the requirements have been delivered. A half baked customer experience (CX) will damage your brand for ever.

Pre-order now (via twitter)

Predicted publication date Dec. 2019

“CEOs hate variance. It’s the enemy. Variance in customer service is bad. Variance in quality is bad. CEOs love processes that are standardized, routinized, predictable. Stamping out variance makes a complex job a bit less complex.”
― Marcus Buckingham

waterfall-startup

Pre-order now (via twitter)

Predicted publication date Dec. 2019

Get big fast.

It’s all about first mover advantage, take the market first or be a follower for ever. Think of Coke and Pepsi… Pizza Hut and Domino’s. With the waterfall startup, plan precisely your growth with a 5 to 10 business plan.

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Gather all stakeholder requirements upfront

Predictability makes everything safer for everyone. Fix early on what you are going to build before doing anything else. Involve all internal stakeholder and wait for final formal approval. Once the gate is validated move to the next phase to design the right solution and the test case. Make sure you cover all the edge case. Double and triple check your solution and design. Request again all internal stakeholder formal approval before moving to the next phase.

Pre-order now (via twitter)

Predicted publication date Dec. 2019

slippery-waterfall

Business Model Generation – by Alexander Osterwalder

Business Model Generation has become a big reference. Explains – with loads of examples, use cases and nice illustrations – a simple and powerful tool to help entrepreneur shape their business ideas. It’s not a book to read but a book to consult as a reference.

On could say the knowledge in this book is also available for free on the web, in blogs, video etc… but the book is tangible and a good place to start.

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The 4 Steps to the Epiphany -by Steve Blank

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“No plan survives first contact with customers” – Steve Blank

Loved Steve Blanks’ The four steps to the epiphany: successful strategies for products that win it’s long to read, but full of valuable lessons on how to create and validate customer demand. With lot’s of B2B examples. The book of reference for customer development, which inspired a lot of the lean startup ideas.

A reference for me too now.

Running Lean -by Ash Maurya

Get Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan that works. It’s the lean and practical handbook on applying those principles to a startup. If you are running a startup and want to spend your money wisely, you need this guide. Clear, simple and actionnable advices. By Ash Maurya, who brought us the lean Canvas. He also explains how he wrote this book the lean way which I found fascinating.


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“Don’t be a feature pusher” – Ash Maurya

The Lean Startup -by Eric Ries

Eric Ries talks are great and his book is a must. It’s easy to read, practical with lot’s of real life examples and situations. If you have a specific idea or project in mind, this book will be a great resource, and help you avoid mistakes that someone else already did.

Get it here: The Lean Startup – How today’s entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses

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The key ideas of the book (or movement now) are well summarised here on the anwser from William Pietri to this question:
Does the “lean startup” philosophy lead to more successful startups?

William Pietri writes the key ideas as:

  1. capital efficiency – This is really an outcome of Lean’s focus on waste reduction. For example, recall WebVan. Their investors paid something like $1bn to find out that the US wasn’t ready for online grocery shopping. Could they have learned that for less money by, say, testing their core hypotheses on a smaller scale? Absolutely, and that’s the Lean Startup’s goal: testing assumptions as quickly and cheaply as possible.
  2. pull, don’t push – Lean Manufacturing aims to start building something only when it is ordered. Similarly, the Lean Startup approach seeks to start with proven customer needs and use that to pull solutions from the team. The difference is subtle in explanation, but profound in experience, and I think you get much better products, and at lower cost.
  3. continuous improvement – Western business culture tends to focus on maximizing results, while Lean practitioners focus on improving the system that gets the results. (E.g., if your goal is to improve sales, a results-focused answer is the quarterly sales goal, but that can lead to problems like channel-stuffing.) This is especially helpful in startups: a company already in the habit of improving things is more likely to scale sustainably.
  4. customer-centered definition of value – Like many Lean ideas, this sounds obvious; the difference is mainly in how seriously it’s pursued. For example, suppose somebody buys your product but never uses it. Some would focus on the sale and call it a win. But in the Lean analysis, it’s a loss: resources were expended but no value was delivered. This focus helps startups build a satisfied customer base and discover the big steps forward in value creation needed to take a big chunk of a market.