Quotes from Eric Ries

I recommend several tactics for escaping the Five Blames. The first is to make sure that everyone affected by the problem is in the room during the analysis of the root cause.

Grockit offers

Vanity metrics wreak havoc because they prey on a weakness of the human mind. In my experience, when the numbers go up, people think the improvement was caused by their actions, by whatever they were working on at the time.

In my experience, whoever is left out of the discussion ends up being the target for blame. This is just as damaging whether the scapegoat is a junior employee or the CEO. When it's a junior employee, it's all too easy to believe that that person is replaceable. If the CEO is not present, it's all too easy to assume that his or her behavior is unchangeable. Neither presumption is usually correct.

The rules that govern the sticky engine of growth are pretty simple: if the rate of new customer acquisition exceeds the churn rate, the product will grow.

The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built?

Remember, planning is a tool that only works in the presence of a long and stable operating history. And yet, do any of us feel that the world around us is getting more and more stable every day? Changing such a mind-set is hard but critical to startup success.

Our goal in building products is to be able to run experiments that will help us learn how to build a sustainable business.

The irony is that it is often easier to raise money or acquire other resources when you have zero revenue, zero customers, and zero traction than when you have a small amount. Zero invites imagination, but small numbers invite questions about whether large numbers will ever materialize.

Failure is a prerequisite to learning. The

Startup success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time.

Planning and forecasting are only accurate when based on a long, stable operating history and a relatively static environment. Startups have neither.

Accessibility also refers to widespread access to the reports.

A pivot requires that we keep one foot rooted in what we've learned so far, while making a fundamental change in strategy in order to seek even greater validated learning. In

Each employee could log in to the system at any time, choose from a list of all current and past experiments, and see a simple one-page summary of the results. Over time, those one-page summaries became the de facto standard for settling product arguments throughout the organization.

Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.

auditable," is so essential. We must ensure that the data is credible to employees.

those building reports must make sure the mechanisms that generate the reports are not too complex. Whenever possible, reports should be drawn directly from the master data, rather than from an intermediate system, which reduces opportunities for error.

Entrepreneurship is a kind of management.

dot-com flameouts that erroneously believed that they could lose money on each customer but, as the old joke goes, make it up in volume.

Building an adaptive organization, in other words, requires executive leadership to sponsor and support the process.

Everything that has been discussed so far is a prelude to a seemingly simple question: are we making sufficient progress to believe that our original strategic hypothesis is correct, or do we need to make a major change? That change is called a pivot: a structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth.

although we write the feedback loop as Build-Measure-Learn because the activities happen in that order, our planning really works in the reverse order: we figure out what we need to learn and then work backwards to see what product will work as an experiment to get that learning

Once you are ready to begin, I recommend starting with a narrowly targeted class of symptoms.