Product discovery plays a significant role in the development of any successful product. It involves researching, ideating, and testing ideas to identify the most valuable features and functionalities of a product. Recently, Lean Startup has emerged as a transformative approach for enhancing product development processes. When integrated with Scrum, it significantly streamlines product discovery and development, ensuring products resonate deeply with the market.
This article details how Lean Startup principles can be applied within the Scrum framework, offering insights for Product Owners, designers, and developers eager to create better products more efficiently.
Lean Startup Overview
Lean Startup, conceptualized by Eric Ries, revolutionizes the approach to business and product development. It’s designed to optimize the product development cycle and rapidly test the viability of business models. Let’s delve deeper into its main principles and practices:
Build-Measure-Learn Feedback Loops
Build: The first step is to create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), which is the most basic version of your product that still allows you to start the learning process as quickly as possible.
Measure: Once the MVP is in the hands of real users, the next step is to measure how it is used. This is usually done through both qualitative feedback (like customer interviews) and quantitative data (like usage statistics).
Learn: The final step is to learn from the measurement results. This learning can lead to further iteration on the MVP — either refining it or pivoting to a new approach entirely.
Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
The MVP is central to Lean Startup. It’s not necessarily the smallest product imaginable but rather the simplest version that allows the team to start the Build-Measure-Learn loop. The key is to launch as quickly as possible with a product that is good enough to start learning from real user interactions.
Continuous Iteration
Lean Startup promotes continuous iteration of products or services based on feedback loops. This approach helps businesses evolve their products rapidly in response to real user feedback, reducing market risks and sidestepping the need for large initial funding and development time.
Validated Learning
This is the process of validating ideas and assumptions about your business and product through user feedback. Instead of relying on guesswork or forecasts, Lean Startup advocates for testing hypotheses through practical experiments and real-world data.
Pivoting or Persevering
Based on the learning gained from the MVP and subsequent iterations, businesses must decide whether to pivot (change course) or persevere (stay the course). A pivot might involve changing the product, the business model, or even the target audience based on what has been learned.
Customer Development
Lean Startup emphasizes understanding your customers and their needs as part of the product development process. This means engaging with customers through interviews, surveys, and feedback loops to ensure the product is meeting real needs and solving actual problems.
Agile Development
While not exclusively a Lean Startup practice, it complements the approach. Agile Development focuses on rapid and flexible development processes, which aligns well with Lean Startup’s iterative nature.
Build a Sustainable Business
The ultimate goal of Lean Startup isn’t just to build a product; it’s to build a sustainable business model. This means continuously adapting not just the product but also how the business operates to ensure long-term viability and growth.
Scrum Overview
Scrum is an Agile framework for managing and completing complex projects. It emphasizes teamwork, communication, and iterative development to deliver high-quality products.
Scrum is based on the concept of Sprints, which are time-boxed periods of work (at most one month) where the team focuses on completing a set of prioritized user stories or features.
It includes events, including Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective, that helps the team stay aligned, communicate effectively, and continuously improve.
How does Lean Startup Complement Scrum?
Integrating Lean Startup principles into Scrum can profoundly enhance the product development process. By breaking down the main principles of Lean Startup, we can see how each supports and enriches a Scrum Team’s approach.
1. Build-Measure-Learn Feedback Loops
Lean Startup: This principle focuses on building an MVP, measuring its impact in the real world, and learning from this experience. It encourages rapid prototyping and continuous iteration based on user feedback.
Complementing Scrum: In Scrum, each Sprint can incorporate elements of the build-measure-learn loop. A Sprint could be dedicated to developing a feature (build), the next Sprint could focus on gathering and analyzing user feedback (measure), and the subsequent Sprint could involve refining or altering the feature based on this feedback (learn). This integration ensures that the Scrum Team is constantly aligned with user needs and market trends.
2. Validated Learning
Lean Startup: Emphasizes the importance of validating ideas through user feedback and data, rather than assumptions or forecasts.
Complementing Scrum: Scrum Teams can integrate validated learning by setting specific hypotheses for each Sprint Goal and validating them at the end of the Sprint. This approach ensures that each iteration delivers value and that the product evolves based on evidence and real user needs.
3. Innovation Accounting
Lean Startup: Involves measuring progress, setting up milestones, and prioritizing tasks that lead to real business value.
Complementing Scrum: Scrum teams can adopt innovation accounting by using metrics and KPIs to assess the value delivered in each Sprint. This data-driven approach helps in making informed decisions about what features to develop next and ensures that the team is working on tasks that offer the most significant return on investment.
4. Pivot or Persevere
Lean Startup: Encourages organizations to pivot (make substantial changes to the product) or persevere (continue with the current strategy) based on learning from the market.
Complementing Scrum: In the Scrum framework, the Sprint Review and Retrospective provide ideal opportunities to decide whether to pivot or persevere. Feedback from stakeholders and team reflections can guide these strategic decisions, ensuring that product development is flexible and responsive to market demands.
5. Minimal Viable Product (MVP)
Lean Startup: Focuses on developing the simplest version of a product that can be released to test a hypothesis.
Complementing Scrum: Scrum’s incremental nature aligns perfectly with the MVP concept. Each Sprint can be used to build or enhance parts of the MVP, allowing for constant testing and refinement. This approach reduces the time and cost associated with bringing a fully-featured product to market that may not meet user needs.
Conclusion
By integrating these Lean Startup principles into Scrum, teams can enhance their agility, responsiveness, and effectiveness in product discovery and development. This synergy ensures not just efficient project management but also the creation of products that are truly valuable, user-centric, and market-fit.
Lean Startup & Scrum in Practice: A Case Study of a Tennis Tournament Management App
Let’s consider an example of how Lean Startup and Scrum can be integrated to develop an application for creating and managing tennis tournaments.
Sprint 1: Building a Focused MVP
The team starts with the development of a focused MVP, which includes user registration and basic tournament creation features. This foundational version aims to provide the simplest yet functional tool for setting up a tennis tournament.
Feedback and Learnings in Sprint Review
At the end of Sprint 1, during the Sprint Review, the team presents the MVP to a group of early adopters, including local tennis club managers. This session is crucial for gathering initial feedback. Users appreciate the simplicity of setting up tournaments but express the need for a more detailed match-scheduling feature.
Sprint 2: Targeted Iteration Based on Feedback
Informed by the feedback received during the Sprint Review, the team dedicates the second sprint to developing a basic match scheduling feature. This feature is designed to be intuitive, allowing tournament organizers to assign matches to specific dates and times.
Further Feedback in the Next Sprint Review
Again, during the Sprint Review at the end of Sprint 2, the updated app is demonstrated to the users. They find the scheduling feature helpful but point out its limitations in handling dynamic tournament changes, such as player substitutions or weather-related rescheduling.
Sprint 3: Responding to User Needs
The third sprint focuses on enhancing the scheduling feature based on the latest user feedback. A dynamic scheduling system is developed for real-time updates and rescheduling. The team also initiates the development of a communication module for sending updates to players and coaches, and they are planning to gather feedback on this in the next Sprint Review.
Continuous Feedback Loop
Throughout the sprints, the Sprint Review meetings serve as pivotal moments for collecting user feedback. This direct input from users guides the team’s decisions on what features to develop next, ensuring that the product evolves based on real needs and preferences.
Conclusion
This case study highlights how Lean Startup and Scrum methodologies can be effectively combined, with Sprint Reviews playing a critical role in facilitating the build-measure-learn feedback loop. By engaging users regularly through these reviews, the team can iterate the product in a focused and user-centric manner, leading to the development of a tennis tournament management app that truly meets its users’ needs.
Additional Examples
In other industries, like healthcare, a Scrum Team might develop an MVP for a patient appointment app, progressively adding features like reminders and teleconsultation based on user feedback loops. In e-commerce, a team could start with a basic online storefront, iterating on features like payment gateways and customer recommendation algorithms.
TLDR
Lean Startup can be employed to complement Scrum and help discover the product effectively. This combination leads to a more focused, user-centered approach in product development, ensuring that the end product is not just well-built, but also well-aligned with the market needs and customer preference.
Learn More
You can learn more about effectively applying Scrum by taking my Complete Agile Scrum Product Owner Certification course at Udemy.
