1. What is the difference between learning and validated learning?
Validated learning is when you make a specific hypothesis and decide on the metrics to measure whether the hypothesis holds before you run your experiment from which you learn.
2. True or false: “According to the author, a startup with exponential growth in metrics like revenue and number of customers is doing well.” Explain your answer.
False. A startup can easily grow in revenue by spending a lot to require customers through ad spending that doesn’t give any evidence of the startup doing something right.
3. Finish the sentence: “almost every lean startup technique we’ve discussed so far works its magic in two ways:”
Make scientific experiments
Talk to your users
4. Ries argues that startups should pay more attention to innovation accounting than traditional accounting. Name two ways in which startups can change their financial metrics to accomplish innovation accounting.
Measure growth in KPI’s and focus on the growth instead on the absolute value.
Build a theory about what risks a product has and make experiments to focus on learning whether those risks invalidate the product.
5. Describe, concretely, what a car company’s supply chain would look like if it used push vs pull inventory.
In the push model the company simply builds a certain model of a car without there being any orders for them. The might be brought to a dealership and the customer can leave with the car directly after finishing a sale. In the pull inventory cars are build according to the specifications of the order of an individual customer and then shipped to the customer.
6. Ries applies the pull inventory model to startups. But what is the unit that is being pulled, and where does it obtain the “pull signal”?
The unit is the whole product (not individual instances). According to Ries, it’s unclear what the product should be and regular engagement with customers leads to building the product that customers actually want to buy.
7. True or false: “Lean manufacturing is meant to give manufacturers an advantage in domains of extreme uncertainty”. Explain your answer.
False. Lean manufacturing happens when there’s a clear idea of what the customer wants and in cases of extreme uncertainty you don’t know what the customer wants.
8. True or false: “Lean manufacturing is about harnessing the power of economies-of-scale.”
True
9. Ries discusses an anecdote of a family folding letters. The dad folds, stamps, and seals one letter at a time; whereas the kids begin by folding all letters, then stamping all, etc. Name two reasons Ries’ considers the dad’s method superior.
The dad learns from the first letter how well it fits into the envelope and can adapt his folding technique based on it.
2. If the project would be interrupted in the middle the dad would have partial success by producing value due to having some letters that are folded well and the kids produced no value at
10. True or false: “A consequence of lean manufacturing is that the performance of each employee as an isolated unit, in terms of output per unit of time, might *decrease*.” Explain your answer.
True. An employee that spends part of their time learning things is less productive at their main task but that learning can be transfered to other employees that then become more productive.
11. Give an example of what a “large batch death spiral” might look like in practice.
WebVan builds infrastructure to deliever foot in many different localities and then ends up not being able to profitably serve any of them and has to shut down their business while losing a lot of money that they invested.
12. According to Ries, the “Five why’s” method is a control system (though he doesn’t say so explicitly). What does it control, and how?
It controls that the guiding decisions at the top have desireable effect on individual errors down the chain. It does so by tracking an error to it’s cause on a higher level.
13. Explain the meaning of Toyota proverb “Stop production so that production never stops”
If the factory gets stopped when there’s a problem and the error gets fixed the factory become more comepetive in the market place and is not going to shut down in the future because of not being competitive in the market place.
It’s probably more then 6 years since I read it.
1. What is the difference between learning and validated learning?
Validated learning is when you make a specific hypothesis and decide on the metrics to measure whether the hypothesis holds before you run your experiment from which you learn.
2. True or false: “According to the author, a startup with exponential growth in metrics like revenue and number of customers is doing well.” Explain your answer.
False. A startup can easily grow in revenue by spending a lot to require customers through ad spending that doesn’t give any evidence of the startup doing something right.
3. Finish the sentence: “almost every lean startup technique we’ve discussed so far works its magic in two ways:”
Make scientific experiments
Talk to your users
4. Ries argues that startups should pay more attention to innovation accounting than traditional accounting. Name two ways in which startups can change their financial metrics to accomplish innovation accounting.
Measure growth in KPI’s and focus on the growth instead on the absolute value.
Build a theory about what risks a product has and make experiments to focus on learning whether those risks invalidate the product.
5. Describe, concretely, what a car company’s supply chain would look like if it used push vs pull inventory.
In the push model the company simply builds a certain model of a car without there being any orders for them. The might be brought to a dealership and the customer can leave with the car directly after finishing a sale. In the pull inventory cars are build according to the specifications of the order of an individual customer and then shipped to the customer.
6. Ries applies the pull inventory model to startups. But what is the unit that is being pulled, and where does it obtain the “pull signal”?
The unit is the whole product (not individual instances). According to Ries, it’s unclear what the product should be and regular engagement with customers leads to building the product that customers actually want to buy.
7. True or false: “Lean manufacturing is meant to give manufacturers an advantage in domains of extreme uncertainty”. Explain your answer.
False. Lean manufacturing happens when there’s a clear idea of what the customer wants and in cases of extreme uncertainty you don’t know what the customer wants.
8. True or false: “Lean manufacturing is about harnessing the power of economies-of-scale.”
True
9. Ries discusses an anecdote of a family folding letters. The dad folds, stamps, and seals one letter at a time; whereas the kids begin by folding all letters, then stamping all, etc. Name two reasons Ries’ considers the dad’s method superior.
The dad learns from the first letter how well it fits into the envelope and can adapt his folding technique based on it.
2. If the project would be interrupted in the middle the dad would have partial success by producing value due to having some letters that are folded well and the kids produced no value at
10. True or false: “A consequence of lean manufacturing is that the performance of each employee as an isolated unit, in terms of output per unit of time, might *decrease*.” Explain your answer.
True. An employee that spends part of their time learning things is less productive at their main task but that learning can be transfered to other employees that then become more productive.
11. Give an example of what a “large batch death spiral” might look like in practice.
WebVan builds infrastructure to deliever foot in many different localities and then ends up not being able to profitably serve any of them and has to shut down their business while losing a lot of money that they invested.
12. According to Ries, the “Five why’s” method is a control system (though he doesn’t say so explicitly). What does it control, and how?
It controls that the guiding decisions at the top have desireable effect on individual errors down the chain. It does so by tracking an error to it’s cause on a higher level.
13. Explain the meaning of Toyota proverb “Stop production so that production never stops”
If the factory gets stopped when there’s a problem and the error gets fixed the factory become more comepetive in the market place and is not going to shut down in the future because of not being competitive in the market place.