I think "The Lean Startup" is a good book - it presents a model for creating a successful business which diverges from older more traditional business thinking.

I think "The Lean Startup" is a good book - it presents a model for creating a successful business which diverges from older more traditional business thinking. Some successful technology companies feel the same way. I also think books like this should be read as guideposts, not as some orthodoxy. If a suggestion from the book goes against particular circumstances or common sense, you do what your common sense tells you. Nonetheless, they seem to have missed important lessons from the book. Or re-learned them rather. The odd thing is they then claim the book does not cover these things, and distracted them from these problems. I don't understand why this is said, since the book does cover these things. The blog post says: > Lean Startup principles distracted us from four livelihood-threatening fundamentals. First, you need rigorous product management. Don’t speculate. Build no feature unless you understand it thoroughly and have unshakeable evidence that multiple customers need it --urgently. But this lesson learned is one of the Lean Startup principles. From "The Lean Startup": "For example, how many features do we really need to include to appeal to early adopters? Every extra feature is a form of waste, and if we delay the test for these extra features, it comes with a tremendous potential cost in terms of learning and cycle time. The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time." ...I quote only one paragraph from the Lean Startup, but the idea about no excessive features in an MVP is repeated throughout the book. It's possible the Lean Startup approach has some holes in it, but warning against too many features in an MVP is not one of them.