Eric Ries

Quotes are word for word from the source.

• Character in crisis

  “Times of crisis give us the opportunity to show who we truly are.”

  Our noteEric Ries discusses how leaders should respond to the unprecedented stress of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Market cycles

  “The startup business moves in cycles, and what goes up will eventually come down. We're in summer.”

  Our noteEric Ries explains that the startup ecosystem naturally experiences booms and busts.

• Over-specification risks

  “the extra detail obscures the artists' original intent in specifying the feature, so the engineers are even more likely to miss the big picture and build the wrong things.”

  Our noteExplaining why more detailed specifications often lead to worse product outcomes.

• Modern Company Structure

  “an old-fashioned company "is composed of managers and their subordinates." But a modern company "is composed of leaders and the entrepreneurs they empower."”

  Our noteEric explains the fundamental difference between traditional management and modern entrepreneurial management.

• Starting with MVP

  “In almost every case, people who ask me about the MVP already have a product in development - and it is plenty good enough to start getting feedback.”

  Our noteEric points out that most founders wait too long to get feedback on their product.

• Policy and Entrepreneurship

  “Entrepreneurship requires a supportive public policy effort. There are real policy implications for what we do as entrepreneurs also on the ballot this year so I urge you to take it seriously.”

  Our noteRies explains why entrepreneurs should care about public policy and voting.

• Testing non-existent features

  “Often, we'd do this before the feature existed at all, apologizing all the way.”

  Our noteIMVU tested customer interest by showing dialog boxes for features that hadn't been built yet.

• Clear Experimental Goals

  “I've always seen that if you don't go into an experiment with a clear goal, everything becomes mushy from that point on.”

  Our noteExplaining the necessity of quantitative goals in business experiments.

• Remote work routine

  “I think my one tip is having a routine, treating working from home as if you were going to work so taking a shower, changing into different clothes, perhaps, and trying to set yourself times to either wind down”

  Our noteSharing advice on how to maintain productivity and mental health while working from home.

• Optimizing the funnel

  “Slowly, over time, we optimized (or eliminated) each step in the process of becoming a customer by giving us money.”

  Our noteThe team worked backward from the payment system to fix the conversion funnel.

• Early startup resources

  “Even 10 or 15 years ago, when I first cut my teeth as an entrepreneur, there were very few things to read. Mostly we read business books designed for established enterprise and tried to read through the lines”

  Our noteEric reflects on the lack of specialized startup advice when he started his career.

• Honest sales projections

  “The truth is, you have no clue what your sales will be, and I fantasize about the day an entrepreneur tells me, "Our projection is a number we're picking out of the air.”

  Our noteDiscussing the common lie that startup financial projections are conservative.

• Product Champion Importance

  “The concept of a strong product champion is a recurring theme in successful product development organizations, large and small. It's even more critical in lean startups when they need to manage growth”

  Our noteEric discusses the necessity of having a dedicated leader for product success.

• Passion and Purpose

  “Top performers found a third way: they matched their passion with purpose. Passion is do what you love; purpose is do what contributes.”

  Our noteDefining the difference between passion and purpose in professional success.

• Reducing product risk

  “By allowing customers to "pull" value from the company in small batches, you reduce the risk of building a product that nobody wants.”

  Our noteExplaining how the lean approach prevents building unwanted products.

• Strategy of discovery

  “But MVP is most powerful when it is used as part of an overall strategy of learning and discovery.”

  Our noteClarifying the true purpose of a Minimum Viable Product.

• Waste in software

  “The biggest waste in software is created from waiting for software as it moves from one state to another: Waiting to code, waiting to test, waiting to deploy.”

  Our noteExplaining how waiting periods create inefficiency in the development lifecycle.

• Releases as non-events

  “Continuous deployment makes releases non-events and checking in code is synonymous with triggering a release.”

  Our noteDescribing the shift in mindset when deployment becomes automated and frequent.

• Team productivity

  “When teams are organized that way they're so much more productive, so much more energized, the creativity you unlock is incredible.”

  Our noteEric describes the benefits of organizing employees into startup-like cross-functional teams.

• VC vs CEO skills

  “Almost no skills from being a venture capitalist translate to being a CEO, and vice versa.”

  Our noteComparing the different skill sets required for investing versus operating a company.

• Opportunity to rebuild

  “We have an opportunity in front of us to rebuild and make our world more resilient, more equitable, and to put human talent to better use.”

  Our noteEric highlights the potential for positive change following a global crisis.

• Unit of progress

  “Its unit of progress is that of validated learning about its customers .”

  Our noteEric describes how startups should measure their growth and success.

• Divergent realities

  “when the numbers go down, we invariably blame someone else. Over time, this allows each person in the company to live in their own private reality.”

  Our noteThe psychological impact of using metrics that don't show clear causality.

• Hiring for bottlenecks

  “unless you are adding capacity to a bottleneck in your development process, you probably should not be hiring at all.”

  Our noteHiring should only happen to solve specific constraints in the value creation process.

• Defining success criteria

  “If you've done the job yourself, you'll know that it's important and you'll know what success looks like.”

  Our noteDoing the work yourself helps you evaluate future hires effectively.

• Preventing Over-engineering

  “This is a built-in cure for the human tendency to over-engineer solutions.”

  Our noteExplaining why the 'Minimum' in MVP is necessary for product developers.

• Understanding exponential growth

  “One of the recurring themes in these conversations is that exponential growth is hard to understand. We're not hardwired for it as human beings.”

  Our noteEric discusses why people often underestimate the speed and danger of a spreading virus.

• Rapid iteration

  “Thus, these teams tend to converge on optimal solutions rapidly, even if they start out with really bad ideas.”

  Our noteRies highlights how feedback loops allow teams to fix bad initial concepts quickly.

• Release early trap

  “if you just follow the release early, release often mantra, you find yourself running around in circles, because you ship code, you get some feedback from people, you do a focus group.”

  Our noteExplaining why shipping frequently without a vision can lead to aimless development.

• Measuring empathy outcomes

  “Lean Startup provides a framework and a methodology for taking customer empathy work and translating that into real and measurable outcomes for our community.”

  Our noteMcAdoo describes how Lean Startup operationalizes design thinking concepts.