In response to http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/16/lean-startups-boo/
I find that most critiques of “Lean Startup” are actually critiques that don’t understand what Lean Startup really is OR critiques of what people do when they misinterpret what Lean Startup really means.
My biggest critique is that Eric Ries did a lousy job of naming his concepts – he picked names that are too easy to misinterpret.
The “lean” in Lean Startup means starting a company with as little waste as possible. The biggest waste is often spending time and money building things no one (or not enough people) want to buy. So the Lean Startup techniques are about how to learn what people want to buy as fast as possible. Even Sharkey would probably agree that’s a good thing. If people mistakenly think that means building features not products it’s not a fault with the techniques.
MVP is also misunderstood. It’s the least amount of “product” you can LEARN FROM not the least you can sell. And I put “product” in quotes because an MVP you can learn from is often not a product at all – it may be a link on a web page or a set of drawings of proposed screen shots or the famous Drop Box Video. Yes it can be an A/B test – but no one is suggesting that you waste a rock star developer’s time. If you don’t know what product people want to buy, perhaps it’s too soon to bring on an RSD (did I just make RSD the new cool acronym? sorry.)
I agree with Sharkey that most of the things he’s complaining about are bad things. I just don’t think they are what “Lean Startup” is really recommending.
