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""the baby with the bathwater by focusing on only doing things that had low option value and low risk. "" That's not what the Lean Startup says. Lean is about

by edoceo 8y ago

""the baby with the bathwater by focusing on only doing things that had low option value and low risk. "" That's not what the Lean Startup says. Lean is about reducing risk but that doesn't box one into only doing low risk/value activity

dmix 8y ago
What Lean says and how people commonly used it are distinct, which is what the OP is talking about. Some people took some parts of Lean too far and didn't focus enough on delivering a high level of value. That takes risk and vision, but you build better products. As opposed to obsessing over managing risk and keeping things lean, without properly investing in the hypothesis to really test them out. Which means in practice a bunch of small half-hearted plays that get abandoned too early - or were inherently a minor incremental value proposition that wasn't valuable enough to build a sustainable business around.
- Jtsummers 8y ago
  This is the same problem suffered by most Capital-N Named Things (Lean, Agile, etc.). By becoming capitalized, they become specific practices. Some of the practices are good, some are good in context, some are bad out of context. But people fail to make the proper value judgements about what's worth it and what's not, and often pick which practices to do by the visibility of the practice. Is a kanban board useful? Immensely. Is it useful if you don't know what it represents? Nope. But it's highly visible so people adopt it. They may get some value, but only limited, if they fail to comprehend it. Or, worse, they get negative value because it becomes a set-in-stone "process" "(We can only handle 4 of X at a time! Scrap everything over that." "Wait, why was it 4?" "Oh, because we had half the staff before. I guess we can actually handle 6 now."). If that question isn't asked, it's fixed in time and the organization isn't a learning organization, it's actually dying but hasn't realized it yet.

by edoceo 8y ago

dmix 8y ago

What Lean says and how people commonly used it are distinct, which is what the OP is talking about. Some people took some parts of Lean too far and didn't focus enough on delivering a high level of value. That takes risk and vision, but you build better products. As opposed to obsessing over managing risk and keeping things lean, without properly investing in the hypothesis to really test them out. Which means in practice a bunch of small half-hearted plays that get abandoned too early - or were inherently a minor incremental value proposition that wasn't valuable enough to build a sustainable business around.

Jtsummers 8y ago
This is the same problem suffered by most Capital-N Named Things (Lean, Agile, etc.). By becoming capitalized, they become specific practices. Some of the practices are good, some are good in context, some are bad out of context. But people fail to make the proper value judgements about what's worth it and what's not, and often pick which practices to do by the visibility of the practice. Is a kanban board useful? Immensely. Is it useful if you don't know what it represents? Nope. But it's highly visible so people adopt it. They may get some value, but only limited, if they fail to comprehend it. Or, worse, they get negative value because it becomes a set-in-stone "process" "(We can only handle 4 of X at a time! Scrap everything over that." "Wait, why was it 4?" "Oh, because we had half the staff before. I guess we can actually handle 6 now."). If that question isn't asked, it's fixed in time and the organization isn't a learning organization, it's actually dying but hasn't realized it yet.