Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale

Questions for readers: Can your product teams openly experiment with new ideas and technology without spending large amounts of time on seeking approval and funding? Can you easily obtain funds for new technology-related work at any time of the year, or are you restricted to an annual cycle? What are your criteria for a successful investment? Is it

Cagan defines vision as the shared understanding that “describes the types of services you intend to provide, and the types of customers you intend to serve, typically over a 2–5 year timeframe.”16 As such, it provides a roadmap and context for MVPs, and we should be prepared to create many MVPs as we search for a repeatable and scalable customer d

Our principles of accounting and measurement for innovation must address the following goals: Establish accountability for decisions and evaluation criteria Manage the risks associated with uncertainty Signal emerging opportunities and errors Provide accurate data for investment analysis and risk management Accept that we will, at times, need to mo

The key to being successful with these cycles (and the scientific method in general) is to use them systematically and continuously. Applying them systematically means using them as a general tool to explore all types of risk, ensuring that the expense of running an experiment is commensurate with the value of the information we will discover. Appl

Our mindset is particularly important in terms of our attitude to failure. People with a fixed mindset fear failure as they believe it makes their innate limitations visible to others, whereas those with a growth mindset are less risk averse by seeing failure as an opportunity to learn and develop new skills.

The process of shaping the vision begins by clearly articulating the problem that the team will try to solve. This essential step is often overlooked, or we assume everyone knows what the problem is. The quality of a problem statement increases our team’s ability to focus on what really matters — and, more importantly, ignore what does not. By deve

In the end, OpEx teams are stuck with justifying their ever growing costs caused by the bloat and complexity created by CapEx decisions. If we are serious about innovation, it shouldn’t really matter which bucket funding comes from. Open, frank discussion, based on real evidence of the total end-to-end cost of the product, is what we should use as

The agile manifesto says we should prefer customer collaboration over contract negotiation. We need to continuously work with our suppliers to produce high-quality results. The best relationships and results are achieved when we don’t throw requirements over the wall and then expect a product or service to magically appear months later. We have to

Eric Ries introduced the term innovation accounting to refer to the rigorous process of defining, experimenting, measuring, and communicating the true progress of innovation for new products, business models, or initiatives. To understand whether our product is valuable and hold ourselves to account, we focus on obtaining admissible evidence and pl