Quotes About Eric Ries

Entrepreneurs always pitch their idea as 'the X of Y', so this is going to be 'the Microsoft of food.' And yet disruptive innovations usually don't have that character. Most of the time, if something seems like a good idea, it probably isn't.

The critical first question for any lean transformation is: which activities create value and which are a form of waste? Once

Here's how to use Five Whys analysis to build an adaptive organization: consistently make a proportional investment at each of the five levels of the hierarchy. In other words, the investment should be smaller when the symptom is minor and larger when the symptom is more painful.

Build-Measure-Learn. The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop.

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

identify the elements of the plan that are assumptions rather than facts, and figure out ways to test them.

lean manufacturing, a process that originated in Japan with the Toyota Production System,

we figure out what we need to learn, use innovation accounting to figure out what we need to measure to know if we are gaining validated learning, and then figure out what product we need to build to run that experiment and get that measurement.

By the time that product is ready to be distributed widely, it will already have established customers.

Start-ups make so many mistakes that the challenge to identify the root cause of a failure is tough. But believing in your own plan is probably the worst.