Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works

by Ash Maurya

Overview

We live in an age of unparalleled opportunity for innovation. We’re building more products than ever before, but most of them fail—not because we can’t complete what we set out to build, but because we waste time, money, and effort building the wrong product.

What we need is a systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success. That’s the promise of Running Lean.

In this inspiring book, Ash Maurya takes you through an exacting strategy for achieving a "product/market fit" for your fledgling venture, based on his own experience in building a wide array of products from high-tech to no-tech. Throughout, he builds on the ideas and concepts of several innovative methodologies, including the Lean Startup, Customer Development, and bootstrapping.

Running Lean is an ideal tool for business managers, CEOs, small business owners, developers and programmers, and anyone who’s interested in starting a business project.

• Find a problem worth solving, then define a solution
• Engage your customers throughout the development cycle
• Continually test your product with smaller, faster iterations
• Build a feature, measure customer response, and verify/refute the idea
• Know when to "pivot" by changing your plan’s course
• Maximize your efforts for speed, learning, and focus
• Learn the ideal time to raise your "big round" of funding

Get on track with The Lean Series
Presented by Eric Ries—bestselling author of The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses—The Lean Series gives you solid footing in a proven methodology that will help your business succeed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781449305178
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	03/13/2012
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	235
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Ash Maurya is the founder of USERcycle. Since bootstrapping his last company seven years ago, he has launched five products and one peer-to-web application framework. Throughout this time he has been in search of better, faster ways for building successful products. Ash has more recently been rigorously applying Customer Development and Lean Startup techniques to his products.

Table of Contents

Foreword XIII

Preface XVII

Introduction XXI

Part 1 Roadmap

Chapter 1 Meta-Principles 3

Chapter 2 Running Lean Illustrated 15

Part 2 Document Your Plan A

Chapter 3 Create Your Lean Canvas 23

Part 3 Identify the Riskiest Parts of Your Plan

Chapter 4 Prioritize Where to Start 49

Chapter 5 Get Ready to Experiment 57

Part 4 Systematically Test Your Plan

Stage 1 Understand Problem

Chapter 6 Get Ready to Interview Customers 71

Chapter 7 The Problem Interview 81

Stage 2 Define Solution

Chapter 8 The Solution Interview 95

Chapter 9 Get to Release 1.0 111

Stage 3 Validate Qualitatively

Chapter 10 Get Ready to Measure 121

Chapter 11 The MVP Interview 127

Chapter 12 Validate Customer Lifecycle 135

Stage 4 Verify Quantitatively

Chapter 13 Don't Be a Feature Pusher 145

Chapter 14 Measure Product/Market Fit 155

Chapter 15 Conclusion 169

Appendix: Bonus Material 173

Index 197