Building the right product requires systematically and relentlessly testing that vision to discover which elements of it are brilliant, and which are crazy.
Interpretation
Creating a successful product involves continuous testing and validation of ideas to separate the valuable from the impractical.
The quote emphasizes the importance of iterative testing in the development of a product. It underscores that a successful product is not only built on a strong vision but also on the rigorous process of evaluating its components to identify what truly works and what doesn't, which can often involve rejecting the less viable ideas.
In practice
In a startup meeting to motivate the team to embrace the testing process.
There's nothing wrong with raising venture capital. Many lean startups are ambitious and are able to deploy large amounts of capital. What differentiates them is their disciplined approach to determining when to spend money: after the fundamental elements of the business model have been empirically validated.
A lot of entrepreneurs hate big companies. But if you hate them so much, why are you trying to build a new one? The truth is, as soon as a startup has any kind of success whatsoever, it will face big company problems.
The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.
The reality is the Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed. Lean startups waste less money, because they use a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas.
You get a culture of entrepreneurship after you have successfully changed the accountability system so that people can use a better process. Process drives culture, not the other way around, so you can't just change the culture, you have to change the system.
Learning to see waste and systematically eliminate it has allowed lean companies such as Toyota to dominate entire industries. Lean thinking defines value as 'providing benefit to the customer'; anything else is waste.
This is what I find most magnetic about successful givers: they get to the top without cutting others down, finding ways of expanding the pie that benefit themselves and the people around them. Whereas success is zero-sum in a group of takers, in groups of givers, it may be true that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
I'm lucky to be part of a team who help to make me look good, and they deserve as much of the credit for my success as I do for the hard work we have all put in on the training ground.
Learn the fundamentals of the game and stick to them. Band-Aid remedies never last.
No great achievement is possible without persistent work.
One very interesting framework for a company to succeed over time - beyond just business logic and analytics - is, do they have a reason why the best graduates in engineering programs will flock to them versus competitors?
In my first year, when I was driving in runs, winning games and making headlines, there was an old man who came to games at Seals Stadium, and one day he called me over, introduced himself and told me not to believe anything written about me or think too much of all the accolades.
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