Lean-Startup and Customer Development

I have been mentoring startups for decades and was an early proponent of lean and agile methods. I have delivered countless seminars on this subject and how it relates to Design Thinking.

A startup is not a small version of a big company but rather any entity in search of a sustainable and scalable business model. The goal of a startup is to discover whether or not you’ve found a problem worth solving (large enough market) and a solution that works (product-market fit).

It can be you alone in your garage or it can be on the 50th floor of a downtown office tower as a skunkworks project at a Fortune 500 company. Brad did one at Telesat, where he led the team that launched Canada’s first satellite-based high-speed internet service.

You know that you’re not longer a startup when you can confidently say you have a business model that works, most importantly, product-market fit.

What Is Lean Startup?

Simply stated, it’s a method for spawning a new business or product with minimal waste, time and spending between conception and the decision to scale or stop. The emphasis is heavily on hypothesis testing, multiple incremental iterations of product releases, and validated learning to determine whether a given business model will be viable. A focus on incremental learning helps reduce overall risk and avoid large capital raises without market validation.

Unlike the traditional startup, in the lean enterprise, you put sales before design and production. How do you know what to design or produce if you’ve never talked to a customer?!

Product releases occur often and incrementally. Early products should represent the minimum viable product that can solve at least part of the problem the startup seeks to address, so that costs are minimized and learning is maximized. Knowledge is the currency in a Lean Startup.

How We Do It

Lean principles can be applied in any sized organization looking to achieve product-market fit.