Build, Measure, Learn
The Build-Measure-Learn template is a Lean Startup concept that looks like this: build a minimum viable product (MVP), measure the success of the MVP, learn from what works and what doesn’t work, and go back and start over with the Build-Measure-Learn cycle, each time faster and clearer, until you have a product that works/sells. This foundational concept for the Lean Startup methodology is based on creating a hypothesis about how your product will perform, building against that hypothesis in a way that minimizes waste of the scant resources of time and money in an early stage company, creating and reviewing actionable metrics for measuring the success, and rapid iteration into the next cycle. It’s an effective startup concept because it’s based on moving fast–building fast, failing fast, learning fast, and pivoting as necessary.
Build, Measure, Learn is incredibly effective, and may be a helpful framework for you and your business as you are building/creating what comes next, so dive in on it with the Lean Startup books if you’re interested! But it is also reflective of a bigger truth that amuses me often–many of our business principles and frameworks are just repackaged intuition and childhood education (thanks to all the great teachers in our midst for all your work in getting us there first!). It turns out that we inherently want to build and create, and we had the added benefit of being guided by caregivers and teachers along the way to build and create with intention and purpose–linking our curiosity, our hypotheses about how things worked and the processes to obtain the results. We practiced these things over and over again, from our play to growing a seed in a milk carton to initiating a chemical reaction in a lab. Build-Measure-Learn is a sped-up version of this very concept in a business-speak kind of way.
Let’s travel back to our childhood selves and check in: constructing a skyscraper with Lego uses the same Build, Measure, Learn process in a more basic sense. We think if we build the tower this way, it will become big and tall and stand on its own. When it collapses suddenly or leans dramatically during construction, it provides actionable feedback that something was awry in the foundation and we must try again. As we repeat the process, we learn quickly what works and what doesn’t, and the 5th time we build the tower, it is much faster and much more effective than the first tower we built. We have effectively used the Build, Measure, Learn process to iterate our way into a successful product!
So why is it that we must be re-taught in business the lessons we have learned already in childhood? It turns out that as we grow into our education, capacity and capability, and we learn more about how the world works around us, we lose our curiosity and our imagination for how things COULD work instead of how they DO work currently. We make assumptions, many without data, about how things work. We are busy, so we rely on what we have already learned and assume that is all we need to learn. We interrupt the process of exploration at the very beginning–we lose the capacity to wonder and explore.
Lean Startup naming the process that we all learned as children as a business framework is intentional–because builders and startup founders and creatives have a similar mindset as children, scientists, and explorers–how could this be different? What other options are there to solve this problem? How can I think about this in a different way that could potentially get me different results? There is something inherent to their way of thinking that allows them to maneuver past assumptions and into curiosity–and the world is better for the innovation that results, even with all the fast fails and the pivots along the way.
Consciously exploring how we lost our way from our childhood selves to our business selves is a good reminder that we could all learn more from accessing the curiosity that drove our learning early in life. There is still much to be learned, no matter how smart and skilled we are, and we are all better off when we put aside our assumptions and look at the world with wonder and interest, instead of busily doing the next thing expected of us without thinking about it.