Lean in book pdf download summary

To measure a runway you can count how many pivots are left to make, how many opportunities there are to make significant changes. Ries measures the runway by pivots or new iterations rather than simply time. Ries explains the importance of holding regular meetings to discuss the need to pivot or persevere.

A pivot is more than just a simple change. Ries explains that a pivot is designed to be structured and all thought out, designed to test a new hypothesis. A Zoom-in pivot is what Ries uses to define the situation when a single feature of a product shifts and becomes the focus of the entire product.

This often happens when a company begins with a broad focus and realises that only one single feature is what the customers want, so they pivot and focus on that! When you might initially be focusing on a single feature but realise that it could be just 1 part of an even better whole product.

So you pivot and focus on that instead. Ries explains that when you need to change from a platform to an application or the other way this is called a platform-pivot. He explains that often startups find themselves doing this pivot more than once. Greggory Moore inspired what Ries calls the business architecture pivot. A sales channel or distribution channel is the way the customers receive the goods, for example, food sold in a grocery store.

Ries explains that in some situations, a company will discover a different type of technology that can achieve exactly what they are after, thus prompting a technology-shift. Ries explains that a small-batch approach focuses on creating a single finished product very regularly, every couple of seconds even. In comparison, a large-batch approach works on producing and finishing all products all at once at the end of a specified cycle.

There are numerous benefits of using the small-batch approach. Namely, problems can arise and be identified sooner. For example, Toyota, the car manufacturers use a small batch approach, they believe that their factories work more optimally in this way.

It is to—as quickly as possible—learn how to build a sustainable business. Ries explains that he uses the term sustainable specifically to eliminate the effects of any one-time customer actions that will never transform into a long-term benefit. For example, occasionally businesses may use an advertisement that will instantly get a lot of customers or sign-ups, but not the long-term valuable kind of customers who are in it for the long run.

Just like an engine, they turn over, and the faster they can turn over, the faster your company will find growth. The churning refers to the number of customers who fall off the bandwagon and reduce or eliminate any engagement with a companies product or service. Ries explains that the goal is to always have the number of new customers considerably outnumbering those that are churning. And if you can achieve this, then your product or service will continue to grow.

And the larger the gap between new customers and churned customers, the faster the growth will occur. Ries uses another engine metaphor to describe the speed at which a companies product or service gains awareness. The goal is to have awareness spread in the same way that a virus spreads to become of epidemic scale. Ries explains that mathematical requirements for a viral campaign of awareness. If only 1 out of 10 customers tells a friend about your product a viral coefficient of 0.

In order for a viral loop to succeed, you need each person to tell at least one other person a coefficient of 1. Moving away from sustainable and organic growth. Sandberg includes many examples from her own life, specifically working with Mark Zuckerberg and emphasises the importance of men supporting women in the workplace, and women supporting women.

We all need to lean in. A great read for any working woman or man to expand their understanding of the current working climate. Sandberg identifies a need for more woman to be in leadership roles and she explains the reasons that woman both hold themselves back and are held back. Sandberg draws upon examples from her own working life, specifically her time working with Mark Zuckerberg. Sandberg makes a real effort to emphasise the importance of men supporting woman in the workplace, and woman supporting other woman.

Sheryl Sandberg is the Chief Operating Officer at Facebook and was the first woman to be elected to their board. Zuckerberg actually hired Sandberg after meeting her at a party, he was not specifically looking for a COO but Sandberg fit the bill.

Before joining Facebook, Sandberg graduated from business school and spent time working at Google and was part of the launch of the philanthropic google. Time Magazine included Sandberg in their list of most influential people in and Fortune Magazine listed her as the 5th most powerful woman in business.

Multiple studies show that statistically, at school age, girls outperform the boys. For this reason, Sandberg sees clear evidence that women are entirely capable of taking leadership roles in the workplace, they clearly have the education and the skills required. However, despite clearly displaying the knowledge and skills required, women are often not seen to be in the leadership roles.

There are a few reasons for this but Sandberg believes that girls are not encouraged to take risks or advocate for themselves. And these two characteristics are crucial in developing ones career. Sandberg explains that entry-level jobs are overloaded with women, however, has roles progress, the women seem to drop off and we end up with the overwhelming majority of leadership roles being filled by men.

Even among highly educated professional men and women, more men than women describe themselves as ambitious. Sandberg believes that women are partially responsible for their own under-representation in high-profile and leadership roles. The reason is that they literally hold themselves back and make the decision to stay where they are. Sandberg explains that many women feel as if they are undeserving or unworthy of the top jobs, and in the rare case that they secure one of these positions, they are left feeling guilty and as if there has been a mistake.

Sandberg explains that women are hard-wired to underestimate themselves. Women can be incredibly tough on themselves, and are likely to be kinder to their male colleagues.

Studies have proven that women judge their own performances at a much higher standard than necessary and constantly believe that they are doing a worse job than they are. On the other side of the scale, men constantly perceive their own performance to be better than the reality.

Sandberg explains that multiple studies performed in the workplace have expressed that for men, success and likability go hand in hand, they are positively related. Whereas for women, the two are much less likely to occur at the same time, they are negatively related. And if a woman is extremely likable, she is less likely to succeed. Sandberg explains that this clearly exemplifies one of the main reasons that women hold themselves back, and are held back by others.

For a male, he will be liked more and more as he moves through his career reaching more and more success. Whereas women will have the opposite experience. And in order to avoid being disliked or dissed in the workplace, woman will downplay any achievements or stop striving for more altogether. Let your employer know that you are not going to accept the original offer on this basis, but you are willing to negotiate.

Connecting oneself to a larger group can have a good impact in these situations. However, Sandberg explains that women need to do more than just act communally, they also need to legitimise their request for a negotiation. However, women are expected to provide a legitimate reason. Sandberg recommends explaining that a senior colleague encouraged you to go ahead and request a negotiation. This will clearly explain to your boss that there is someone else batting for you.

It is easy to dislike senior women because there are so few. If women held 50 percent of the top jobs, it would just not be possible to dislike that many people. Everyone needs to get more comfortable with female leaders—including female leaders themselves. Sandberg reflects upon her time at Facebook, after working alongside Zuckerberg for about six months they sat down for a formal review. Zuckerberg explains that one of her biggest weaknesses was that she wanted everyone to like her.

He explained that this was destined to hold her back. Sandberg prefers to refer to a career as a jungle gym. She explains that there is not one single path from the bottom to the top as a ladder would suggest. Rather there are multiple ways, some go directly up, and some take a longer route often facing setbacks, detours, and even dead ends. Sandberg explains that rather than being intimidating, the jungle gym concept should be comforting in the current job climate.

It means that people on the job hunt may have to accept a job that is not quite what they hoped, but they can be comforted by the fact that there are multiple ways upwards from there.

At the bottom of the page, you have a Download button. You track clicks on this Download button. You can test your hypothesis without an app at all. If you funnel in users, you can see how many people enter the page, and how many people click the button. For example, say we wanted to measure engagement in an app by number of photos sent.

Each week, we take all the users who joined that week, and then look at the average number of photos each user sends in their first day. We work really hard for 4 weeks, and we hope to see this number rise.

Instead we see this:. We're the most efficient way to learn the most useful ideas from a book. Ever feel a book rambles on, giving anecdotes that aren't useful? Often get frustrated by an author who doesn't get to the point? We cut out the fluff, keeping only the most useful examples and ideas. We also re-organize books for clarity, putting the most important principles first, so you can learn faster. Other summaries give you just a highlight of some of the ideas in a book. We find these too vague to be satisfying.

At Shortform, we want to cover every point worth knowing in the book. Learn nuances, key examples, and critical details on how to apply the ideas. You want different levels of detail at different times.

That's why every book is summarized in three lengths:. Starting with just the MVP, Votizen was at a good starting point, and without a chance to improve the metrics, it was too early to pivot. The first round of optimization led to major improvements in every single metric. But the second period of optimization, costing much more time and money, led to barely a bump in metrics. This is a sign to pivot — they had taken the current idea as far as they could go.

From user interviews, Votizen got another idea — pivot to a way to let voters contact their elected representatives easily. Users could write an email or tweet, and Votizen would print a paper letter and send it to their Congressional representative or Senator.

Even better, they could charge for this service and start funding the company through revenue. Here were the metrics:. This concept maps directly onto building a startup. Instead of releasing a fully-featured product once a year, you could release small batches of features regularly. With smaller batches, you detect problems and measure impact earlier. Would you rather find this out incrementally with 5 small batches in 5 weeks, or 1 big batch in 10 weeks? Engineers scour user forums looking for feature requests.

Users then give feedback on the new release to point out bugs and suggest new features. Contrast this approach to the monolithic, huge-batch method of Apple, where a new version of iOS is released annually, and minor updates are introduced once every few months.

Asking Five Whys lets you figure out the root cause. Depending on how grave the problem is, you can then make a proportional investment to fix it.

This requires you to quantify the size of the problem. You can do this in units of resources — namely, person-hours or dollars. And you can solve problems iteratively too. For first-time problems, make a smaller incremental improvement to the root cause. If the problem recurs, then you have more information about whether you want to invest more. The important goal is validated learning, discovering the truth about the world in a rigorous way. Think about Lean Startup as a mental framework for how to think about building a sustainable business.

What is your value hypothesis or growth hypothesis? What is the fastest, cheapest way you can validate this hypothesis? Track clicks and attempted downloads to gauge how much users want it. Video MVP : make a video simulating what the product does. Even without using the actual product, watching the video will give enough info for viewers to decide whether they want the product shown.

Concierge MVP : instead of building processes that scale, run very manual processes dependent on special white-glove treatment.

Often the founders themselves deliver the service. This accelerates learning and allows quick iteration on the product. Wizard of Oz MVP : if you plan to build fancy automated technology, try to test it with a human behind the scenes.