Lean Change Management: Innovative practices for managing organizational change

by Jason Little

The Lean Startup Method teaches organizations how to develop their market and build demand for their new product before they spend all their cash building something no one will buy. Lean Startup organizations do this through a looping Build, Measure, and Learn cycle. 1. Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), which is designed to test your assumptions about how customers will respond to your product. If you think potential customers will use five features of your new product, your MVP could simply be releasing one of those features you think is the most valuable. 2. Measure the response to your MVP through, what Lean Startup calls, “pirate metrics”: Acquisition: Get a new customer Activation: The new customer signs-up and use the product Retention: The customer comes back and uses it again Referral: The customer shares the product with their friends Revenue: The customer pays for your product 3. Learn about how people use the product from your measurements, and feed that data into your next MVP. And repeat. Another way to think of Lean Startup is that it’s like Dr. Deming’s PDCA (Plan Do Check Act) loop, only cooler.