Erik Rees, author of The Lean Startup, engages those who want to create a new book.

Released in 2011, the book “The Lean Startup”, describing a “lean” approach to creating innovative companies, has become very influential. Now its author, Eris Rees, is working on the book “The Leader's Guide” on how to implement “lean” ideas in specific life situations - and does so in an unconventional way.

He organized a crowdfunding campaign , and those who supported it will receive the book exclusively, it will not go to stores (another one will be written later for a wide audience). However, the goal of the campaign was not only to collect money. In the matter of practical implementation of the ideas of “The Lean Startup”, Rice wants not to limit himself to his own experience, but to study as many other people as possible - therefore, backers get access to a special community to share start-up experience. The campaign, which set a target of $ 135,000, has already raised $ 440,000, and now there are four days left until its end.

Here are some of the ideas of Rees, with whom he is now moving from ideology to practice:
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Why do startups need a different approach to measuring productivity

Regular companies and employees measure their productivity by how many units of something produce per day. The chef can measure it with dishes, and the programmer with lines of code.

This approach assumes that the product can be sold at a profit. This is a logical assumption for a successful business in a long-established industry.

But startups, by definition, are trying to create new product categories in situations of extreme uncertainty. There is a big risk that no one will buy the finished product. And in this case, it does not matter how “productive” the company was before, because no one will benefit from the great work done.

"Minimum viable product" allows you to get feedback as early as possible

Rice argues that startups should think about their performance differently: as the ability to quickly receive feedback and respond to it. Good startups increase it, reducing the amount of time spent on products that are not needed by consumers.

The key strategy here is to create a “minimum viable product” (minimum viable product, MVP). This is a real product, not just a prototype. But the goal is to launch it as early as possible, even if it still does not have some key features, and so far it can only attract a small subset of the target audience.

At times, MVP can be startlingly minimal. For example, the popular online shoe store Zappos began with the following actions: go to offline stores, take pictures of shoes there, and indicate on the website that it is on sale. If someone ordered their shoes, they would return to the same store in Zappos, buy them at full price and send them to the buyer.

Obviously, in the long run, such a model cannot be viable. But this start allowed Zappos to learn a lot about the market, without investing a single dollar in goods or warehouses. He avoided the risk of spending millions of dollars on creating a store infrastructure that they would not use.

This approach seems counterintuitive for many people who are experiencing that a low-quality MVP will alienate customers and harm the brand. But buyers who are unhappy with the restrictions are better than no buyers. And when you create a new product, the main risk is the lack of buyers.

Why specialized teams kill innovation

Many companies are organized by function. The company has a sales department, a design department, programmers, and so on. And although this method of organization is intuitively attractive, Rees claims that he is deadly for innovation.

Once again: the key to innovation is to find out quickly what consumers want, and then act on the basis of this knowledge as quickly as possible. At any given time, different companies will have different ideas about how to make the product better. For example, a sales team, often in contact with customers, may know which functions they would like to receive, while the technicians know which functions are technically possible.

If these two groups are divided into different departments, they will more slowly understand what needs to be done. Some employees will spend hundreds of hours creating a new function until others tell them that users need a completely different one. Salespeople can promise something to users for a long time, until they know that it cannot be realized.

Rees points out that this idea — cross-functional teams are more effective than specialized ones — seems counterintuitive to many people. When teams gather people with different skills, they often feel less productive because they have to spend much more time communicating with people with other skills.

Individual employees may feel that this reduces their productivity. But these dialogues tend to increase the productivity of the entire organization, which is less likely to spend time on unnecessary things. The programmer will hear how the salesman at the next workplace promises the client the impossible. Sales staff will be able to give the programmer feedback on what customers want.

Can each team act as a startup?

One of the main themes of The Lean Startup is that any company, be it big or small, old or new, can be innovative. Theoretically, the strategies that Rice offers, including a minimum viable product and cross-functional teams, can be adopted by a company of any size.

However, a large company that wants to resort to them faces difficulties. Organizing a company by task is such an intuitive idea that it usually does. And the larger and older the company, the more difficult it is to change how things are done in it.

And while MVP is a great way to test a new product for a startup, for a large company the potential threat in it is much higher. Consumers expect that a new product from a well-known brand will meet a certain level of quality, and if it does not meet, it is judged very strictly. Big companies are naturally cautious, because they have something to lose.

Rice, of course, is aware of these difficulties - and in the new book he is going to write, in particular, about ways to overcome them.