That new product idea that you have for your organisation? There is a 70-90% chance it will fail.

Why?

Because you don’t know what you don’t know.

If you launch a fully-featured product without testing your potential customers prior you risk wasting all your valuable capital. Sure you will learn a lot, but the “tuition fees” could cost your business, career, reputation or all of the above.

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries identifies an approach that can reduce the risk of failure for new products for Startups, Enterprises and Government. Ries’ book includes the following well-discussed concepts:

  • First build your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to learn what customers want (and don’t want).  Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) has said, that if you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, then you have launched too late.
  • Continuous Deployment, especially for software products. This is also known as the repeatable strategy of Build-Measure-Learn.
  • At some point (before you run out of capital), you realise the current course has no viable future, you Pivot. 

Despite being a fan of the book, it is one thing to know the concept… and it is another to be able to apply it. In most cases, we learn more about something through doing, than by listening or reading.

There is now a new way to help your team better apply Lean Startup, through Playing Lean – the board game that teaches the Lean Startup in 90 minutes. 

This video provides a great summary of the benefits of Playing Lean.

The game has received some high-profile endorsement from Ash Maurya, author of Running Lean. 

Playing Lean is rapidly growing around the world with the following Governments and Institutions around the world: Startup Labs Oslo, Swiss Startup Factory, Innovation Lab Fribourg, Swiss Startup Association, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, and Berlin University of the Arts.