lean-startup
Concept of the skill
What it is: Lean Startup is Eric Ries's methodology for creating products and ventures under extreme uncertainty by running disciplined build-measure-learn loops. It treats progress as validated learning about a sustainable business, not as the amount of product shipped.
Mental model: Start with a vision, identify the leap-of-faith assumptions that must be true, choose the riskiest assumption, build the smallest ethical experiment that can test it, measure customer behavior with actionable metrics, and decide whether to pivot, persevere, stop, or run the next loop.
Why it exists: Teams often spend months building a polished product before discovering that customers do not care. Lean Startup compresses that waste by making the learning question, evidence threshold, and decision rule explicit before the build effort begins.
What it is NOT: It is not ordinary agile delivery, generic user interviews, research synthesis, feature prioritization, OKRs, positioning, valuation, or permission to release a careless product.
Adjacent concepts: customer development, MVP, concierge test, wizard-of-oz test, smoke test, fake door test, cohort metrics, actionable metrics, innovation accounting, pivot, persevere, value hypothesis, growth hypothesis.
One-line analogy: Lean Startup is instrument flying for product uncertainty: move in small loops, read the gauges, and change course from evidence.
Common misconception: MVP does not mean "smallest thing we can ship." It means the least effort that can produce validated learning about a specific assumption.