About Eric Ries
Eric Ries is the author of the bestselling book The Lean Startup (2011), as well as the popular entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned. He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. In 2010, he became an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School.
Main points
- Most time we are building products nobody needs.
- A startup exists to learn how to build a sustainable business.
- Design is very important in the context of a lean startup.
- Learning and experimentation is continuous. It is not only happening during the iterative design process.
- Products are never done.
- Designers don’t know the answers to everything.
- The lean startup feedback loop is build-measure-learn.
- Departments are the enemy of progress. People think of their deliverables as most important. The waterfall approach is the cause of the problem.
- Engineers, Marketers, and MBAs all feel under appreciated. Not just UX researchers.
- The solution - stop giving deliverables, stop writing reports. Instead, build truly cross-functional teams that work together throughout the entire lifecycle of the product.
- Whoever has the most political clout in their organization will win the argument. But that doesn’t have to be that way.
- Customers have no idea what they want. Entrepreneurs do not know what customers want, they only think they know. They have a hypothesis.
- The lean startup calls for testing hypotheses. We all agree that we have a strong point of view about what customers ought to want and that we have a rigorous methodology for testing which elements of our vision are brilliant and which are crazy.
- We pivot to a better idea once we have learned something. This way, we all have a role to play.
- Entrepreneurs should always try to learn how to do user experience research themselves before hiring a specialist.
- Entrepreneurs (usually with an engineering background) can’t tell if they are hiring the right UX professional.
- If you feel you know what customers want, you are wrong, and you do not need to hire a designer.
- Entrepreneurs love arguing about what their product should be.
- Translate all these opinion battles into empirical questions for testing. Let’s just double check the world works based on our business plan.
- Good design changes customer behavior. Something might look pretty but if it doesn’t change behavior, it is not good design.
