5 Outstanding Benefits for Great Lean Startups Practices

The first steps of a new business are always unsafe. After all, those who start an enterprise can feel lost due to a lack of experience and a large number of innovations in the market.

Furthermore, even when the first obstacles are overcome, the challenges do not end: growing steadily and sustainably can be an impossible mission without the help of effective techniques that favor risk reduction and promote a gradual increase in profitability.

In this post, you will get to know the lean startup methodology and how can Agile bring benefits to it. Despite being recent, this approach is already gaining prominence around the world.

What is a lean startup?

Created by entrepreneur Eric Ries in Silicon Valley, the term aims to “do more with less”. In other words: reduce costs while the efficiency of the projects is enhanced.

Lean startup is a value delivery philosophy. Its main feature is the validation of hypotheses through experimentation (instead of more rigid and elaborate planning).

At the end of the process, there is always a decision to be taken: the continuity of the initiative or “pivoting”, which is accompanied by a strategic repositioning.

This approach differs from the traditional management model, which starts with the idea of ​​a product or service, followed by the business plan, presentation of the idea, and fundraising – a process that can take months or years. It is important to use tools like GitScrum Boards, which helps you organize your workflow wisely and avoid going backward in your business plan.

Lean startup, in turn, promotes agile development of the project, based on practical tests and direct feedback from the client.

Benefits of lean startup methodology

Through an immersive consultancy, it is possible to see the many advantages that a lean startup can provide to companies. Let’s see a few advantages that will let you go with agile in a lean startup.

1. Simplified processes

Lean startup thinking takes the idea of ​​building, measuring, learning, and adjusting to an extreme.

This makes it easier to define hypotheses to validate in different areas of the company (until it is possible to find the ideal combination, capable of making the business work).

It’s a simplification when it comes to creating an entrepreneurial project, which allows an idea to be easily transformed into a business model.

Another advantage is that this tactic is in line with the Lean and Agile philosophy. This speeds up the performance of teams, who will develop the product using other agile methods such as Scrum or Kanban.

2. Low cost

The use of lean methodology improves the return on a financial investment as it tests the viability of the product in its leanest conception. With the elimination of unnecessary steps, waste and unnecessary expenses disappear.

3. Constant learning

Progress in the lean startup methodology is measured by the quality level of results and customer feedback. This is a type of validated learning, as the main objective is to focus on solutions that consumers really want (albeit in a scenario of extreme uncertainty).

When the company is focused on finding the right idea to build and knows what customers are willing to spend it on, there’s no need to spend months waiting for a launch. Instead, entrepreneurs can adapt their plans gradually, minute by minute.

4. Adaptability

The lean method adapts perfectly to changing businesses and environments, as it allows the execution of fast analytics, which generate confidence in promoters. This favors the quick identification of the business’s strengths and weaknesses.

5. Incentive to innovation

By promoting constant improvement, the lean business model opens the way for investment in original ideas and creates a culture based on innovation within the company.

After all, identifying new opportunities, creating prototypes, and collecting customer opinions are always frequent in the practice of this methodology.

Self-management

One of the most striking features of agile methodologies, especially Scrum, is the self-organizing teams. That’s simply a cool way of saying that everyone is committed to the project’s progress and success.

These ways of managing projects work with a clearly defined time constraint. Using GitScrum Sprints leads you to help increase your team’s performance weekly, for example. In short cycles of time, activities are defined that teams can deliver there. Neither more nor less than possible.

This type of deadline adjustment, being revisited and analyzed, allows the team to become increasingly aware of its production capacity. In the first applications of an agile methodology, teams can end up getting their predictions wrong. Over time, however, members integrate and predictability becomes more accurate.

Team form

These are usually small groups of up to 10 people who will work on a project. The intention is for everyone to follow the work of each one and be aware of all the dependencies that exist in it.

With team members knowing that their work is needed for other activities to follow, it’s easier to prioritize what needs to be done.

Agile methodologies have to rely on the commitment of members to achieve good results. All together determine the tasks that will be done, especially if you turn out to keep your work efficiently with our Task Custom Fields.  It is essential that everyone publicly commits to deliverables and ensures that the team will be able to finalize their deliverables.

Many people can depend on their own members and not having a more incisive vision in the management and determination of tasks is a risk. Agile even helps us to see who the professionals are prepared to take on this challenge.

Another thing is that we can think that methods like Scrum end up being incomplete. But it turns out that these methodologies force the team to have autonomy in:

Self-discipline: The team needs to know where to go and what needs to be done. Everyone is responsible, and the team manages its time and activities to deliver the promised deliveries to the customer.

Documentation: Whatyou record so that the team can better understand how their journey is going. How many activities are delivered in each project package, how much effort is invested in each one, etc?

Planning: Over time, the team learns the limitations of its members and becomes aware of what is possible to assume. In addition, the team responsible for the work sees individual growth more clearly, motivating less experienced members.

How to apply lean startup methodology to business?

Above all, top management must be committed to adopting the model. After all, it will be responsible for defining the flow of processes and, above all, for removing any impediments.

In addition, management needs to act in conflict management (when they occur) and make several alignments with the traditional part of the organization, to avoid inhibiting the agility of teams that use lean startup.

MVP

After management approval, the second step is to investigate the customer’s pain and identify what needs to be addressed to develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and start the learning process as quickly as possible.

This MVP is nothing more than a prototype of the solution that will be launched on the market. With it, the company can test, predict and modify patterns. The goal is to redesign the model until the idea is actually sold or discarded.

Measurement of results

Once the MVP is established, a boot should act to tune and improve the engine created. This involves learning and should include useful metrics that demonstrate a cause-and-effect relationship.

Project automation

The use of a lean structure necessarily involves automating as many processes as possible. For this, the business needs to invest and rely on a high degree of automation in its deployment infrastructure, in addition to excellent software engineering.

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