Thursday, September 15, 2011

The Lean Startup

Eric Ries defines a startup as "A human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty." Earlier this year, I attended the lean startup conference and applied some of the startup lessons learned principles to the start-up inside SAP, Career OnDemand. The Career OnDemand team was advocating radical concepts to some of the most conservative companies in very traditional industries in the US and Europe. Instead of building a product and releasing it to customers after 18 months, we worked with customers from day one and showed them our work in the form of prototypes almost every other week. The result is a product that is designed and validated by tens of customers.
I received my complimentary copy of Eric Ries's book, The Lean Startup yesterday I recommend the book and the approach, even if you are not a startup. Did I mention SAP is the largest enterprise software company in the world. If it works for someone like us, I suspect it might work for you as well. I'll keep you posted about how it is going for us. Stay tuned.

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