There’s much discussion in the start-up community at the moment about the pros and cons of taking a ‘lean’ approach when it comes to establishing a new business. For some people, it’s the only approach and should be part of any new firm’s DNA. For others, it’s unscientific and risks getting products to market in a haphazard way.
The lean start-up approach, in essence, means that when you launch any new business or product you do so based on validated learning, experimentation and frequent releases, which allows you to measure and gain valuable customer feedback. In other words: build fast, release often, measure, learn and repeat.
The principles of Lean
Lean Start-up methodology is based on a few key simple principles and techniques:
- Create a minimum viable product (MVP): The product should be feature-rich enough to allow you to market test it and launch with enough features to allow you to collect the maximum amount of data
- Use a continuous delivery model: Constantly work to add new features to your product to enhance its use and make it more compelling for users. This should be done quickly and with the least amount of friction
- Constantly test: Use A/B testing of different versions of the same feature on different user segments to identify which is more valuable
- Act on metrics: If you can’t measure it, you can’t act on it to ensure that you are always improving your product.
Lean start-up engineering
A lean start-up approach seems to work well for consumer products and services. Facebook does it, pushing out new code to its platform at least twice a day. These changes include tweaks to the Facebook API which has more than 40,000 developers using it for building apps.
But what if you’re building an enterprise product or platform? Can you move at the same fast pace? Absolutely! There are lots of product companies out there who have applied the lean start-up model successfully including Dropbox, IMVU and Etsy.
The engineering philosophy behind it makes total sense – move fast, build quickly, automate testing, validate your decisions through data, leverage open source when you can, build MVPs and get as close to continuous deployment as possible. Not only does it make sense, it’s also a fun and enjoyable way for engineers and product teams to work together.
As an enterprise software company, it’s possible to run like a start-up and release new features at a rapid pace. Here are a few pointers:
- Be agile: Have your developers use agile development – they will love you for it. Iterate quickly and make builds available every night for other teams to try out and provide rapid feedback
- Test, test, test: Be sure to beta test new features with early adopters – including your community and customers – to gain valuable feedback before getting too far into development
- Start with an MVP: When you launch a new product, release an MVP and expand additional capabilities later — without bloating it with unnecessary features
- Iterate often: Release new versions of your product often – monthly or weekly. And, if you run in the cloud, you can even do it daily
- Go open source: Consider open-sourcing certain aspects of your platform. Just dealing with forks and pull requests with new features from developers in the community will force you to build a very lean and nimble engineering team. Plus it’s good karma!
Make sure you lean into lean engineering – it’s going to be a win-win for you and your customers.
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