Innovify | The Lean StartUp

The Lean Startup vision introduces a methodology for building a technology product. In short, a Lean Startup is a low-burn technology venture which combines the customer development methodology. In his pragmatic view on how to integrate customer development with Innovify, he advocates an approach with two teams. The cross-functional problem team continuously validates the problem hypothesis and updates the product concept.

The Pivot

A key aspect to any startup is defining the problem that it tries to solve. Customer development advocates a cross-functional problem team that intensively works with customers and continuously defines and adapts the problem hypothesis.

Lean StartUp

The systematic approach of customer development produces a series of invalidated problem hypotheses. At each iteration, the team adapts one piece of the hypothesis which includes, among others, customer segments, feature set and positioning. Each change builds on the lessons learned in validating the previous problem hypotheses.

The pivot is the incremental change to the problem hypothesis. Building on the continuous feedback of the early adopters, the pivot represents the minimal change needed to address the barriers of the hypothesis.

The vision of the startup assures a coherent direction despite many incremental changes to the product concept. In the absence of a strong vision, incremental changes may steer the product concept into a random direction.

The Minimum Viable Product

Deciding what and when to ship to customers is a key part of any venture. Due to very limited resources, startups are forced to find the minimum feature set required to engage with their early evangelists. Lean startup teams often overestimate the minimum feature set by a big margin and that the best approach is to divide that initial set down several times. Shipping the minimum set of features may produce surprising results from the customer base.

Despite a limited feature set, customer might actually be happy with the shipped features. Visionary customers are very forgiving as they not only buy into the current product but the vision of the startup. By focusing on the minimum viable product, startups avoid the mistake of building a product that nobody wants. By engaging with the target segment early on, the Customer Development methodology offers more advice on building a product for a few engaged customers instead of trying to build a product from the outset for everyone.