To understand the emergence of Lean Startup and LeanUX, two new methods that seem to be storming the media and software landscape in the business press, we need to go back and understand how these are really the exaptation of Lean Systems Thinking and principles, transplanted from the world of manufacturing into the world of software design. The very idea first introduced by Buckminster Fuller, when he said that everything was becoming ephemeral, or more recently when Marc Andreeson said, “software is eating the world.”
We'll cover aspects of LeanUX research and Lean Startup, which is conducted to gain a validated understanding of the customer’s problem hypothesis to understand if the problem we think customers have, is something they actually have before spending months and tens of thousands of dollars doing wasteful UX research & design time on a concept that delivers no customer value.
This is a radical departure from the traditional “Push,” systems of software design that has dominated the landscape since the early 80s. We’ll trace the provenance of many “new” ideas surfacing in the Lean Startup movement, and show that for many people familiar with Lean Thinking, there is nothing really new here - except some of the nuances in which enterprises are exploring new ways of imaging value creation in large enterprises where more and more of the “output” is information and knowledge, not cars and jet engines.