Running Lean, 3rd Edition

Preface

Time flies. It’s been 10 years since the last edition of Running Lean. Since then, I’ve spent thousands of hours training and coaching hundreds of product teams, coaches, and stakeholders all over the world. My goal was to further test and refine the systematic step-by-step process that I laid out in the book across a diverse set of products and industries.

Along the way, I developed additional business modeling tools (the customer factory blueprint, Customer Forces Canvas, and traction roadmap), better validation strategies, and more practical techniques synthesizing concepts from a wide range of methodologies and frameworks, including Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Business Model Design, jobs-to-be-done, Systems Thinking, Behavior Design, and many more.

I found that to achieve breakthrough innovation under conditions of extreme uncertainty, you shouldn’t be limiting yourself to any one of these frameworks, but rather should be using all of them. While they all overlap, each has a specific superpower that makes it stand out above the others. I’ve curated these superpowers into a new framework of frameworks (the Continuous Innovation Framework) that is laid out in this book.

In this 10-year anniversary edition of Running Lean, you’ll find:

• More effective stress testing techniques for shaping your early business model

• A completely revised problem discovery interview script for uncovering real customer problems worth solving

• A battle-tested process for building products ...