Why read Eric Ries's The Lean Startup?

Eric Ries’s book The Lean Startup has transformed entrepreneurship and innovation.

Eric Ries, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, draws lessons from the failures and successes of startups. He extracts the fundamental principles that allow startups to succeed. By naming and codifying them, he makes his principles tangible, understandable and transferable.

In practice, Lean Startup explains how to think about your product with the minimum set of features to avoid building a useless product, and how, from that starting point, to iterate quickly: that is, build and test new features to understand what customers really use.

Lean Startup transposes the concepts of lean management to the context of extreme uncertainty a startup finds itself in. In an innovation process, where is the waste? How do you practise continuous improvement and make sure you focus your efforts on creating value for the customer? Lean Startup makes sense when you are trying to discover what you need to build to meet customers’ needs.

For entrepreneurs, Lean Startup is a scientific approach and practical tools to develop their project.

For product and marketing managers in large companies, Lean Startup makes it possible to design and test new offers, with concrete data from the field.

In his book, Eric illustrates his principles with examples he lived through personally, but also with other Silicon Valley companies.

This book has now become a reference, at the origin of a real groundswell in the business world. The Lean Startup approach has transformed several companies by making them faster, more agile and more customer-centric, including General Electric through its FastWorks programme.

In 2015, Eric Ries entered the Thinkers 50 ranking alongside Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen.