A Brief Introduction to Lean

1. Practicing Lean for Startups Part I
By
Mohamed Fouad El Nawawy, M.Sc.

2. Lean Approach
• Increased creativity of workers
• Small batch sizes
• Just in time production
• Inventory control
• Acceleration of cycle times

3. Feedback Loops
• New product needs optimization in
development, marketing and operations
• Build-Measure-Learn: A strategy for the
product to decide when to make a sharp turn
(pivot) e.g. scaling and when to (persevere)
along current path.

4. Vision
• It’s a destination of creating an innovative,
sustainable business of high impact in terms
of value for customer.

5. Validated Learning
• Empirical demonstration that a team has
discovered present and future business
prospects
• Quantitative targets lead to qualitative
measures
• Empirically through experimentation rather
than market research

6. Value vs. Waste
• Value is providing benefit to customer
including learning what creates value for the
customer otherwise is waste
• This description works on well with the
concept of validated learning
• Value is acquired through discovering what
customers really want not with assumptions

7. The Audacity of Zero
• It is easier to get funding resources when you
have zero revenue due to high expectations
than when you have small revenue which
raises doubts

8. Experiments for creating value
• Guided by vision
• Hypothesis about what will happen after
launching product
• Testing this hypothesis empirically
• Better test a prototype (quantitative testing)
in order to reach qualitative learning
• If successful then project starts to grow:
enlisting early adopters, increasing number of
employees

9. References
• Eric Ries, “The Lean Startup,” 2011