last chance kickstarter

The Lean Startup Newsletter - April 15, 2015 by Eric Ries

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April 15, 2015My Kickstarter campaign ends tonight at 7:58 PM PST -- this is your last chance to get a copy of my book, The Leader's Guide, and be part of an exclusive backer-only community.This 4-color, 250-page, hardcover and digital book will only be offered through this Kickstarter campaign--according to my agreement with my publisher, Crown, the book can never be sold in stores. Check out the campaign here.Before the campaign ends, I wanted to share a brief excerpt. As usual, I'm leaving out important details like company names in order to respect their privacy while the book is still in early draft form. Building a culture of experimentationAt many of the large organizations I’ve worked with, teams build a version of a product, ship it, then think about the next version at some point--likely, at the next annual review.But that’s much too late. Why?Because if a product is a big hit, then as soon as it hits the market, the clock has started ticking on people trying to copy it. Speed is essential if you want to avoid commodification, so teams should begin working on the next generation immediately. If the product is a flop, the moment after it flops is the time when you learn the most and are in the best position to try something different. Speed is essential if you want to make use of your learning before competitors do, so you should begin working on the next generation immediately.No matter what happens, the right thing to do after launching a product is to work on the next version immediately. So why do we have to decide whether to do the next version or not? It’s better to think of it as an automatic response to putting a product on the market—but in order to do that leaders need to foster a culture of experimentation throughout their organizations. *REDACTED, a vice-president at fast-growing startup REDACTED, recently shared with me some of the company’s strategies for building a culture of experimentation:Small, autonomous teams: “The more a team can do on their own, the faster they can go,” he said.Continuous deployment: A continuous deployment strategy has helped the company move quickly, and helped keep them lean.Don't get religious about process – just continuously improve: “You need to strike a balance between process and problem-solving. You don’t want to get so committed to a particular process that you can’t adapt to problems as they actually present themselves,” he said. “You want to be flexible enough to change your process across teams as you scale--but as a rule of thumb we question every new bit of process someone tries to add because process is easy to add and very difficult to remove once it's in place.”Of course, REDACTED did not always have an experimentation culture. Like many startups who’ve gone through periods of hyper-growth, it didn’t have systems or processes in place from Day One to support its new size or needs.As the startup has grown, REDACTED has tried to instill “just enough process to avoid utter chaos” while encouraging team autonomy.“Whenever somebody says something in a meeting like, ‘I think X,’” he said, “someone else goes, ‘That’s a nice hypothesis. Let’s go try that out,’ I think that healthy level of testing keeps you lean, it keeps you close to the customer, and that’s one of the things that I think helps us a lot.”

Eric Rieshttps://twitter.com/ericrieshttp://www.startuplessonslearned.com