Lean Branding

Foreword

When new startup teams begin learning the Lean Startup methodology, they often ask me when the period of experimentation will end so they can start building the “real product.” I have to break it to them that there’s no such thing as the final product—every product launch is an opportunity to discover how to better delight the customer. The “Build-Measure-Learn” process begins when we ask what we are hoping to discover about our customer or our strategy—and it should continue long after our first product launch.

At the core of Lean Branding is the idea that just as products are never truly finished, brands, too, must be committed to adaption and evolution. Companies cannot afford to let their brands stagnate or think of them as a “set of features,” argues Laura Busche. Instead, they must build chameleon brands that “adapt to consumer’s ever-changing needs and desires” by putting their assumptions to the test and using what they’ve learned to iterate and adapt.

This is easier said than done.

I’ve worked with “builders” from many different sectors. Even if the materials they work with are very different—some write code, others build healthcare devices or heavy industrial equipment, still others design user experiences—what they share is a desire to use their expertise to build “high-quality” products to present to customers. But the Lean Startup methodology challenges us to rethink the notion of quality. The Build-Measure-Learn loop is a way to overcome the very human tendency to over-engineer solutions before we’ve tested whether our “solution” has anything to do with a real customer problem.

Busche also discusses the importance of measuring the right things. The metrics-obsessed among us can get very excited by any sign that we’re getting some traction—but it’s important to distinguish between “vanity metrics” (the ones that look good on paper but tell us nothing about our potential for growth) and “actionable metrics” (data we can learn from and use to further the process of experimentation and iteration).

In the section on Measurement, Busche provides some useful examples of the metrics that matter—the ones that are connected to the way our businesses make money or grow our customer base. Only by changing customer behavior in some way—whether customers make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, agree to share their time or make some other exchange of value—can we be sure that our experiments were a success. This process of experimentation and measuring what our customers value is also a way to foster deep relationships over time—the hallmark of successful brand development and a great way, I’d argue, to deliver products and services that deserve the title “high-quality.”

Eric Ries

San Francisco, CA

September 3, 2014