By Tristan Van Iersel.
The lean strategy process ensures that startups innovate in a disciplined fashion so that they make the most of their limited resources. Lean strategy helps company builders choose viable opportunities, stay focused, and align the entire organization.
The process begins with setting the venture’s vision
Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision continuously. Lean isn’t simply about spending less money. Lean isn’t just about failing fast, failing cheap. It is about putting a process, a methodology around the development of a product.
The Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
A core component of Lean Startup methodology is the build-measure-learn feedback loop. The first step is figuring out the problem that needs to be solved and then developing a minimum viable product (MVP) to begin the process of learning as quickly as possible. Once the MVP is established, a startup can work on tuning the engine. This will involve measurement and learning and must include actionable metrics that can demonstrate cause and effect question.
Is it time to Pivot?
When this process of measuring and learning is done correctly, it will be clear that a company is either moving the drivers of the business model or not. If not, it is a sign that it is time to pivot or make a structural course correction to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy and engine of growth.
Validate your learning
Once entrepreneurs embrace validated learning with experiments, the results of those experiments and decisions lead to learning that reshapes the strategy. It will help the company to focus on what the customers want and to build the right thing without spending months waiting for a product beta to be launched to change the company’s direction. Instead, entrepreneurs can adapt their plans incrementally, step by step, minute by minute and therefore reducing their costs.
Article written by Tristan Van Iersel
