Hello Innovator!

I recently had an interesting exchange with a respected advisor in the startup space. The statement that jumped out at me? “Lean Startup is Bullshit.”

My immediate reaction was, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You’re dumping on one of the most widely respected and highly touted startup frameworks ever written.” But if you step back and think about it, Lean really has become bullshit.

This week, we dig into why.

Here’s what you’ll find:

• This Week’s Article: Lean Startup is Bullshit

• Share This: How do we define “product?”

• Case Study: How W.L. Gore Builds Startups from the Inside

Lean Startup Is Bullshit

Ask how a startup is building and you’ll hear the usual words: MVPs, experiments, pivots. Ask what they’re actually doing and you’ll see something else: roadmap-driven delivery, feature dumps disguised as learning, and teams that stick with bad ideas far too long.

Lean Startup is bullshit. 

It’s been watered down, misapplied, and ritualized to death.

MVPs Are Not the Product

One of the biggest misunderstandings in Lean stems from how people interpret the term "Minimum Viable Product."

Teams (justifiably?) get stuck on the word "Product." They assume it means something shippable, polished, or scalable. But the MVP isn't the product you're trying to sell. It's the tool you use to test if the product should exist in the first place.

Done right, an MVP is a focused experiment. Nothing more. Nothing less.

It isolates a key assumption and tests it as simply and cheaply as possible. That might mean a landing page, a clickable prototype, a spreadsheet, or a concierge workflow. If it helps you answer a critical question, it's doing its job.

Done wrong, an MVP is just a soft launch. A version-one release with no learning objective. A placeholder you slap the word "Lean" on so you can keep building.

But an MVP is just the wrapper. The engine underneath it — the thing that makes Lean work — is experimentation.

What is an Experiment?

The word "experiment" gets used a lot. But most of what passes for experimentation in startups is just light marketing or iterative shipping. It's activity without risk.

A real experiment has structure. It starts with a hypothesis. It defines what would prove or disprove that belief. And it ends in a decision. If your experiment can't fail, it can't teach you anything.

Experimentation is the engine of Lean. It's not one step in the process. It IS the process. Without experimentation, you're just guessing in smaller chunks. You may be moving fast, but you don't win points for running the wrong direction in first place.

Learning what works means being explicit about what might not.
It means committing to kill ideas that don't pass the test.
It means recognizing that failure isn't the opposite of progress. It's how progress is achieved.

Most teams don’t have a shipping problem. They have a validation problem. Experiments bring focus; they slow you down in the right places so you can go faster everywhere else.

The fastest teams aren’t the ones that ship the most. They’re the ones that focus on what the evidence proves is valuable. And pivot when the evidence tells them to.