

Why I Don't Like the Lean Startup - adamzerner
http://www.collegeanswerz.com/why-i-dont-like-the-lean-startup

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crawfordcomeaux
I think the point of "assuming your idea is wrong" is a technique for managing
risk.

The author fails to take into account a huge source of human error when it
comes to what he's proposing: ego.

"Startups are about identifying what people want, and giving it to them.
People tend to be pretty bad at doing this because they’re not honest with
themselves about whether or not people actually want it."

People are even worse at being honest with themselves about what they're good
at and what they know. The result of assuming you're wrong & testing all
assumptions is discovery of the "unknown unknowns." Yes, it takes time, but
there are loads of techniques/processes that have been developed in the past
few years that minimize that time.

If your goal is failure, hand the reins over to ego. If your goal is success,
question everything.

~~~
adamzerner
"People are even worse at being honest with themselves about what they're good
at and what they know. The result of assuming you're wrong & testing all
assumptions is discovery of the 'unknown unknowns.'"

True. There's absolutely an advantage to testing. The question (as always) is
whether the opportunity cost outweighs this advantage. I think that "question
everything" is a huge overgeneralization. You don't have time for that. To be
successful, you _have_ to have the ability to put yourself inside the minds of
your consumers, and know what they want (at least in the big picture sense.
obviously feedback is useful for smaller things).

~~~
crawfordcomeaux
I think it's sort of a lesser of two evils that's chosen for the sake of
increasing the overall success rate of startups.

Imagine 3 people creating 3 different startups: one's humble, another's an
ego-maniac, and the third's balanced between humility and ego. The humble
one's probably going to go the route of "over-testing," to some degree (though
you could argue that confirming an assumption is right is just as valuable as
discovering it's wrong). The ego-driven person thinks they know what customers
want, but is likely wrong about some things. For the sake of simplicity, let's
say the humble one will succeed as a result & the ego-driven one will fail.
Obviously, that's not realistic, but if you consider each person as
representing the average success of all startups that operate within their
range of the "humility spectrum," it sort of makes sense.

Now imagine that the person in the middle doesn't know whether they should
trust themselves or to question everything and will operate based on what you
tell them. If you give them permission to trust themselves, they'll go the way
of the ego-maniac. If you tell them to question everything, they'll go the
route of the humble one. If you tell them "test what you need to and trust
yourself on the rest," they stay right where they are because they don't have
any metrics for gauging themselves.

People will easily detect wasted time/effort spent on testing & adapt to avoid
it. It's much harder to detect false understanding before wasting time on
development.

~~~
adamzerner
Moving forward and developing an idea that no one wants is definitely a
problem. Testing is a decent way to rectify this problem. However, I think
that the _underlying_ problem is that people are coming up with bad ideas in
the first place. No amount of testing and iterating is going to save someone
who is incapable of putting themselves inside the minds of the consumers and
knowing in a big pictures sense what it is that they want.

And even if testing does lead you to better understanding of your consumers,
that doesn't change the fact that it isn't always proper. It's a case by case
basis. Sometimes you are confident that you know what they want, and testing
would take time away from other things. You seem to be arguing that in the
aggregate, it would be useful if people of certain "humilities" tested more.
That's probably true, but my two points are: 1) they'd be better off solving
the underlying problem of their abilities to know what people want. (this is a
good starting point for learning -
[http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html))
2) you shouldn't make decisions based on the aggregate population. you have
more information, and you can decide whether or not testing is appropriate
based on your personal situation.

~~~
crawfordcomeaux
The aggregation aspect of the thought experiment was just to frame things. I'm
not a proponent of making decisions based on the aggregate. A TL;DR version of
what I wrote might be "Learn to do it right before you do it well."

Developing enough empathy for consumers is definitely necessary, but also
really difficult to do. Design thinking is the best approach to solving that
problem I've encountered so far, but testing is still a huge component.

This reminds me of an awesome series of posts on how to run a 5-day design
sprint that came out of Google Venture's design team:
[http://www.designstaff.org/articles/product-design-
sprint-20...](http://www.designstaff.org/articles/product-design-
sprint-2012-10-02.html)

~~~
adamzerner
"Developing enough empathy for consumers is definitely necessary, but also
really difficult to do. Design thinking is the best approach to solving that
problem I've encountered so far, but testing is still a huge component."

I guess we agree then.

