Many people, perhaps, are willing to start an enterprise and set up a business. Even more so in a world surrounded by new technologies and new products developed by several startups.
That's it. Creating a startup should be the way to start this entrepreneurial journey and to be able, who knows, to change the world.
In fact, Startups are able to develop products and new businesses, which cause a lot of admiration by people and awaken a desire to also undertake.
However, starting a business from scratch is not an easy task. And when it comes to setting up a Startup, the difficulty and risks increase considerably.
So how can we reduce these risks and uncertainties so that we have a better chance of our venture being a success?
The Lean Startup concept then comes to help manage a Startup in a more efficient way than a traditional business vision.
Keep reading this article to understand what this concept is about!
Also understand how UX Design adds value to the business!
What is Lean Startup?
Lean Startup is a concept created by Eric Ries it is primarily used to help develop and market startup products.
Behind this concept there are a series of processes and methods based on the ideas of Lean Manufacturing, resulting in a new way of looking at and doing business.
The creation of the Lean Startup was very important for new businesses to be able to develop from a quickly and with adequate control of the risks involved. In addition, the concept managed to break certain paradigms of large companies with regard to the development of new businesses.
What is the history of this concept?
The history of Lean Startup has as its starting point a situation that, perhaps, most of us have experienced: the debacle.
Before being the creator of the concept, Eric Ries was the founder of Startup Catalyst Recruiting, which did not achieve the expected success in launching its product.
The main reason for this failure was anxiety to develop an ideal and complete product, without first understanding what the real expectations and needs of the end user were.
Then, after Catalyst Recruiting, Eric Ries worked at Startup There, Inc.. Despite its great contribution and structure, There, Inc. did not achieve the expected success of its product, also because it did not really understand what the needs of the final consumer.
In this sense, we can see that the origin of the failure of Eric Ries' two undertakings were quite similar. And he was able to identify that resemblance as well.
After these two situations of defeat, Eric Ries learned from mistakes and added to them the concept of Lean Manufacturing. Thus, in 2008, Ries developed the concept of Lean Startup and revolutionized the startup market and agile product developments.
Lean Manufacturing
Although the focus of this article is not on Lean Manufacturing, let's quickly go through its objectives and principles to help you understand why Eric Ries relied on this concept to develop the Lean Startup.
Lean Manufacturing emerged in a post-war period in 1950 in Japan. Its creator Taiichi Ohno was an engineer at Toyota and his idea was develop a method that would reduce waste and increase the value of products.
The main objectives of Lean Manufacturing They are:
- Cost Reduction;
- Continuous Improvement;
- Agility in Production;
- Higher production capacity;
- Work environment improvements.
In addition, based on these objectives, Lean Manufacturing Possessed 5 basic principles:
- Value: Know how to identify what the value of the product is for the customer;
- Value flow: Understand which stages of production add value or not;
- Continuous Flow: Production without interruption;
- Pulled Production: Producing based on demand;
- Perfection: Produce with the highest quality.
With this, we can understand a bit of the basis that gave rise to the Lean Startup.
Design Thinking was also important in the development of Lean Startup
What are the principles of Lean Startup?
There are some principles, established by Ries, that relate to the Lean Startup concept and how to conduct this philosophy in the development of new products and businesses. They are:
- Entrepreneurs are everywhere;
- Entrepreneurship is management;
- Validated Learning;
- Responsibility for Innovation;
- Build-Measure-Learn.
1) Entrepreneurs are everywhere
It is quite common to hear stories of large companies that started their operations inside the garage of their parents' house.
In this sense, we are left with the impression that this is the beginning of every entrepreneur, But that's not true.
Entrepreneurs are everywhere: in their parents' garage, in companies, in coffee shops, at the reunion of their children at school.
The idea of this principle is to understand that Everyone can be an entrepreneur regardless of where and how the idea comes from.
2) Entrepreneurship is management
At first, we may have the idea that a startup is just about developing a product.
But in fact, Is a startup an institution. Therefore, it is necessary to know how to manage it properly.
As startups live in situations of risks and uncertainties, the way of managing must be different, adapted to these circumstances.
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3) Validated Learning
Eric Ries offers a new way of looking at startups when he says they don't exist to build things, make money, or serve customers.
But who exist to learn how to create sustainable business models.
In this sense, one of the principles of Lean Startup is validate this learning, through processes and methodologies that make it possible to extract knowledge from tests and experiments.
4) Responsibility to innovate
It's not enough for startups to propose to innovate without doing it the right way.
Having ideas and putting them into practice is great, but you must also have Focus on the most bureaucratic things, such as: measuring progress, determining objectives, knowing how to prioritize work, etc.
Esse sense of responsibility and accountability it is important to improve the innovation process and boost the results of Startups.
5) Build-Measure-Learn
According to Eric Ries, this cycle is fundamental for the development of a Startup.
It is a method where the priority is rapid learning and product improvement through customer responses.
In other words, the startup must build the product based on the idea, implement and measure the results of that launch. Then it is necessary to analyze the results, correct the flaws and implement again.
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Why did Lean Startup revolutionize the way startups do business?
The first startups didn't come up with the Lean Startup concept in hand. That's exactly why the Startups where Ries worked were not successful and he was able, through this experience, to create this innovative concept.
But what is so different about this methodology that enabled this Startup revolution?
In the past, common sense was that an entrepreneur, before creating his business, should have in hand a plan to implement - the famous Business plan.
So, what was necessary to have in that plan? Things like:
- Demand forecasting;
- What are the costs;
- What is the price of the product/service;
- What are the growth expectations for the next 5 years.
Realize that, before even starting to lay bricks on bricks, the entrepreneur should know, or at least have a notion, of What would be the growth of your business for years ahead. The idea was to have an analysis of the business without even having the business.
The concept of Business plan it can work in larger companies when on a project to launch a new product. In fact, many companies must actually use this concept.
However, a startup is in a completely different context from that of large companies. Startups have much greater risks and uncertainties and a wrong prediction can easily bankrupt the initiative.
And that's exactly what happened. Entrepreneurs with their Business plans, placing accurate numbers in a totally uncertain environment. The fall was almost certain.
Business Plan vs Business Model
While traditional companies trace their Business plans and try to execute them, startups are looking for a business model — Business model — for you.
This difference is one of the main issues contained in the Lean Startup concept.
In this way, we can additionally list 3 main key points of Lean Startups that make a difference in the way you do business:
- Entrepreneurs accept the environment extremely uncertain in which they are inserted and, instead of drawing up an execution plan, they begin to list a series of assumptions about your business, creating a Canvas named business model;
- Startups take to the streets. They will put their hypotheses and yours Business model to the test, asking potential users, customers, partners. The idea is to take the feedbacks necessary to improve and increase the model. In this way, startups arrive at a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to be implemented. Remember Build-Measure-Learn? This is where it starts;
- Startups should use concepts from Agile Philosophy in the development of their products. That is, the improvement of the product through iteration and real feedback from your users.
It is these key points added to the principles seen above that made Lean Startup a very efficient concept in reduce risks and enable growth of startups.
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What does UX Design have to do with it?
We have already been able to observe that Lean Startup was a concept that revolutionized the way in which startups do business.
In this sense, one of the most interesting innovations of this concept is the form how product development is managed.
As seen, Lean Startup values iteration and user feedback to improve its product. This ends up becoming a cycle.
In this way, Lean Startup also ended up impacting the way How Designers develop and think about the product and services in question.
Once the product is developed based on feedback from users, we can see how important this vision was for UX Design too.
Lean Startup placed at the center of its decisions the user needs and the value that the product has for them.
As a result, the Designers also had to adapt their way of working and start using new tools and methodologies, such as Design Sprint, for example.
However, we cannot say that without Lean Startup, UX Design would not have the importance it has today. But we have to understand that this concept helped UX to rethink its way of working to adapt to these new challenges.
Because of this, a methodology was developed based on Lean Startup: Lean UX. A methodology that aims at more agility and less waste of resources in product development.
