Disciplined as opposed to Lean
The Lean Startup philosophy is something I've been following a while now. Having watched Eric Ries' talks (although he does seem to repeat his talks substantially), most of it seems to be quite obvious. I'm wary of philosophies in general because it's easy for a lot of people to follow them blindly without considering that they are just broad guidelines - ultimately you make your own rules for your company (and for your life for that matter). Of course it helps to learn from others' experiences, but following advice wholesale is recipe for disaster.
[As an aside, Andy and I fortunately have similar tastes in terms of companies we admire - GitHub, 37Signals or Craigslist are a few we look up to. Like them, our goal is to execute on our vision with maximum force and minimum fuss. Watch this space for a lengthier post on companies we admire.]
The Lean Startup philosophy is often misunderstood to mean cheap, bootstrapped and blindly optimizing based on customer metrics, which Eric clarified a few days ago to be not true. It simply means (and I agree), that you have to quantifiably measure your progress, learn from it and decide whether to stay the course or pivot on your vision. Come to think of it, Randy Komisar's new book 'Getting to Plan B' also offers similar insights.
Although the core tenets of lean startup probably don't apply to Gameplan right now since we don't have any users yet - there's still a ton of learning happening.
As mentioned before, we try to avoid making big decisions, but instead make tiny decisions on a weekly or daily basis, thus giving us ample room to pivot in case things don't work out. Already in the last three weeks, we've decided to take out to-dos from our sprint and add new ones, because we've been handling one particular type of problem for too long, for example. We've even changed design and implementations half-way after we've started, but because we don't invest too much time trying to think of the perfect solution, it becomes a less difficult decision for us to redo stuff.
We've also tried to be religious with tracking our progress. Regular readers of Naked Startup will have noticed our weekly statistics report, quantifying our progress in terms of lines of code, lines of test code, how many features we've completed, how many issues we've closed, etc. Again hard-core lean startup enthusiasts will argue that there is no real learning to be had from coding. But I believe that pair-programming and behaviour-driven development give huge learning benefits from knowing your own product, how it works and learning in terms of knowing one another as team-mates. Too many times, I've seen founders who don't know how their own products work and that is something Andy and I want to avoid like the plague.
One really significant hole in our Lean-Startup practice so far has been the lack of a unified metrics-dashboard. We still check on Google Analytics (for both Gameplan as well as Naked Startup), Code Analytics and Signup Analytics separately - we should probably use our Friday afternoons to build a unified dashboard ala Panic.
I guess being 'lean' is just a common-sense move. No startup wants to be shooting in the dark, because that is just stupid. Maybe Eric Ries should have opted for a less-catchy-hashtag-but-probably-more-meaningful catch-phrase: Disciplined Startup.
