The Lean Startup movement isn’t terribly new, but the level of hype is reaching pretty significant levels. The contrarian in me is always a little wary when anything gets overly hyped. To be clear, I really really like the concepts of the lean startup and customer development. I’d recommend any…

My response to Rob’s thoughtful post:

Agreed on the lack of magic formula, and certainly official-looking charts are deceptive. On the other hand, the charts are a useful too to communicate differences against other startup / development approaches.

re: big opportunities vs lean; this a point a lot of smart, lean-wary startup friends bring up, and I think it’s a good one. My thoughts: in the spirit of “there is no one size fits all”, if we do away w/ all the CD/Lean ‘stuff’ except the core principle, learn fast, then I think that logic applies to any organization pursuing any particular vision, no matter the scope.

Make sure your team is learning fast & furious, and if you aren’t capable of articulating what you learned last week, recognize that it’s unclear if you’ve made forward progress. If it wasn’t possible to learn, fine, but if it was, you’re at risk of ‘straying’. If that persists week over week, where’s the forcing function to keep you in check? Months & months of ‘work’ without external validation is clearly a company killer.