Summer of Startups: Validate Your Vision

Lean startups are currently all the rage in the Finnish community.

Marko Taipale, CTO of Huitale opens the third week of Summer of Startups lecturing the teams about agile development. He profiles the most important contemporary thinkers, such as Steve Blank and Eric Ries, and shares some of his company’s favourite learnings from the movement.

First up, what is a startup? According to Eric Ries, a startup is a human institution creating a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Note that size does not matter -a startup is a state of mind, therefore it can be any new service or product development in any firm. By this definition, projects such as Microsoft Bing could be considered a startup -despite the not-so-uncertain cash reserves, their operations do face many other uncertainties.

What do you think? Do actors like Bing qualify as a startup?

Marko reccomends making the iteration cycle as short as possible. The lean startup movement is foremost about learning. Success should not only be measured in revenues or amount of features but how fast one is capable of learning. And as he remarks, no plan survives first contact with the customers.

Minimun Viable Product, MVP, as Marko points out, should make you feel embarrassed. Keep cutting features until that happens. As Joe Ive, Senior VP of Design at Apple once remarked, “it’s the things that are not here that we are most proud of”.

Watch Marko’s talk in full here.

Last week, we also had a big name in the house, when Osma Ahvenlampi from Sulake came by to talk about agile development. Watch his equally great and informative talk on the topic of today below.

UPDATE

Take a look at Marko’s slides below. Thanks for the presentation, Marko!