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Sounds to me like a hollow, bullshit term when you put it that way. If that's what "lean" is, then we should just call it learning best practices. From what I

Sounds to me like a hollow, bullshit term when you put it that way. If that's what "lean" is, then we should just call it learning best practices. From what I understand, "lean" as Eric Ries & Steve Blank describes it has a very specific meaning and it's mostly a collection of activities that is suppose to lead to fast, customer-driven product development and better ROI on marketing dollars, while reducing wasteful activities that suck up time and money. Coming from this perspective, I find Edward's query worth exploring. I'm no "lean" expert so I might be wrong. I've been looking forward to Eric's upcoming book to read and get a better grasp of what he's talking about. :D Update: This presentation provides some real insight into how Steve Blank and Eric Ries define lean startup: http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/customer-development-past-present-future-steve-blank-111909 http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/customer-development-past-p...

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
Lean is taking a process and stripping out everything that is not necessary -- thereby making it lean. Practitioners will take that a step farther and claim that there is some irreducible set of activities that somehow guarantee results. It's been my experience that such practitioners commonly overstate their case, thereby creating an opportunity for dissapointment with folks like the article author. This is a never-ending treadmill: some great guy jumps into agile or lean, has a few good projects, and suddenly is an expert on it. So he writes a book with his "prescriptions" Some folks buy, some folks balk. There are videos, seminars, folks who "get it", folks who do not, etc. It just goes on and on. Please don't take that as cynicism on my part, because it's not meant that way. I think it's up to the people who are serious about this to decide if they want to work at a meta level -- understanding the concepts that are being applied and feeling free to include or toss things -- or if they simply want a recipe book. If you want a recipe book, good luck to you. There are a lot of them out there, and more will be coming in the decades ahead. I don't mean that in a snarky way. I am eagerly looking forward to where the agile startup movement is going because I think it's going to have an immensely positive impact on all kinds of things. But if you don't understand which questions to ask, as this author did not, you will never be happy with the answers. This author had a poor model of the problem he was trying to solve. This model will continue to prevent him from being satisfied until he changes it.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

Lean is taking a process and stripping out everything that is not necessary -- thereby making it lean. Practitioners will take that a step farther and claim that there is some irreducible set of activities that somehow guarantee results. It's been my experience that such practitioners commonly overstate their case, thereby creating an opportunity for dissapointment with folks like the article author. This is a never-ending treadmill: some great guy jumps into agile or lean, has a few good projects, and suddenly is an expert on it. So he writes a book with his "prescriptions" Some folks buy, some folks balk. There are videos, seminars, folks who "get it", folks who do not, etc. It just goes on and on. Please don't take that as cynicism on my part, because it's not meant that way. I think it's up to the people who are serious about this to decide if they want to work at a meta level -- understanding the concepts that are being applied and feeling free to include or toss things -- or if they simply want a recipe book. If you want a recipe book, good luck to you. There are a lot of them out there, and more will be coming in the decades ahead. I don't mean that in a snarky way. I am eagerly looking forward to where the agile startup movement is going because I think it's going to have an immensely positive impact on all kinds of things. But if you don't understand which questions to ask, as this author did not, you will never be happy with the answers. This author had a poor model of the problem he was trying to solve. This model will continue to prevent him from being satisfied until he changes it.