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Is Lean the Agile of startups?

• wpietri 15y ago
  Sort of. I haven't read the book yet, but from Eric's blog, he mentions three books as big inspirations: Beck's "Extreme Programming Explained", Poppendieck's "Lean Software Development", and Blank's "Customer Development". The first two books were also important in the Agile community. (Although in my view what now gets sold as "Agile" has watered both of those down almost to the point of meaninglessness.) The third is new, and provides an approach to business that complements Agile software development practices very well. So you could look at the Lean Startup approach as Agile (or perhaps the best of Agile) for startups. So far, though, the Lean Startup movement still has substantial depth. I think that's because startup people all know they're in a do-or-die situation, and they are willing to work very hard for a competitive advantage. The real question for me is whether the Lean Startup community can retain that depth as it gets more popular. Business is terribly faddish, and now all manner of large companies are going to want to pretend they're lean startups. They will pay people lots of money to help them pretend. Let's hope that money isn't enough to corrupt the actually useful material in the Lean Startup approach.