The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

by Eric Ries

Learning, by contrast, is frustratingly intangible.

Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop.

Startups also have a true north, a destination in mind: creating a thriving and world-changing business. I call that a startup’s vision. To achieve that vision, startups employ a strategy, which includes a business model, a product road map, a point of view about partners and competitors, and ideas about who the customer will be. The product is the end result of this strategy (see the chart on this page).

And yet, imagine a modern manager who is tasked with building a new product in the context of an established company.

A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.

Validated learning is the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a startup’s present and future business prospects.