Ries says you start with the acknowledgment that “we are operating amid uncertainty—and that the purpose of building a product or doing any other activity is to create an experiment to reduce that uncertainty.” This means that instead of asking the question, ‘What will we make?,’ the emphasis should be on ‘What will we learn?’ “And then you work backwards to the simplest possible thing—the minimum viable product—that can get you the learning,” he says.
