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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:

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.

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.

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.

Pivots are another idea that’s lost its meaning. Originally, a pivot meant making a specific, evidence-backed change in strategy. You tested an idea, it didn’t hold up, and you changed direction based on what you learned. It wasn’t change for the sake of change. It was a decision driven by evidence.

Today, teams use the word "pivot" to avoid the word "failure." An idea doesn’t work, enthusiasm fades, and instead of facing the data, they switch tracks and call it a pivot. It’s an escape hatch dressed up as progress.

This isn’t just semantics. When teams pivot without confronting what failed, they drag their original assumptions with them. Nothing really changes except the surface-level story.

A pivot should be uncomfortable. It should cost you something. Not because pain equals growth, but because real learning reshapes how you think about the problem. If your pivot doesn’t change your behavior, your roadmap, or your priorities, it’s just an avoidance tactic.

Real pivots challenge your assumptions and realign strategy to learnings. 

Nearly every serious innovation framework touted by consultants, strategists (and yes, even us at Innovate, Disrupt, or Die) anchors some part of its playbook in Lean principles.

And for good reason...
Lean gives large companies a way to shake their addiction to certainty. It gives them a model for learning before committing, testing before scaling, and validating before launching.

Corporate teams don’t need to behave like startups. They need to unlearn the rigid processes that keep them from adapting: slow planning cycles, early overcommitment, and measuring success by volume instead of value.

But, as with startups, the problem isn’t the method. It’s the misuse.

In the corporate world, Lean quickly turns into theater.
MVPs become miniaturized roadmaps.
Experiments are pre-approved campaigns with no real risk of failure.
Pivots are bureaucratic rebrands, not learning moments.

Lean, when practiced properly, should challenge power structures. It should introduce doubt. It should slow the wrong things down and speed the right things up.

But most enterprise environments aren’t built to reward that. So instead, they bend Lean into what fits, and in doing so, they gut its value.

Lean promises to surface risk early. Corporates use it to justify decisions already made. Lean says start with what you don’t know. Corporates start with what they can sell upstairs.

That’s not innovation. It's a safety net dressed up as a methodology. A way to demonstrate "momentum" without risk. And it’s exactly how Lean becomes bullshit. It gets twisted into something it was never meant to be, even when the intentions are solid and the frameworks are sound.

Lean exists to challenge the habits that cause teams to run out of runway: building too much, too soon, without evidence. It pushes for clarity over output, signal over spin, and insight over assumption.

When wielded with discipline, Lean delivers.
It instills that you don’t need a roadmap. You need a question.
You don’t need a feature list. You need a test.
You don’t need momentum. You need evidence.

The real problem isn’t the Lean framework. It’s our refusal to engage with the hard parts: uncertainty, feedback, and failure. That's what corrupts Lean.

The method was never the problem. Our unwillingness to use it honestly is.

Call it Lean. Call it something else. Scrap the branding entirely.
The experimental approach works.
But only for those who have the discipline to actually do the work.

Most corporate innovation efforts bolt Lean principles onto slow-moving bureaucracies. W.L. Gore took a different route. They used Lean Startup to unlock innovation from the inside out by treating internal teams like venture-backed startups.

Known for creating GORE-TEX (the amazing material that makes your jackets and boots waterproof) and other category-defining materials, Gore doesn’t just experiment in the lab. They built an internal model for launching new ventures with autonomy, experimentation, and customer focus baked in. Small, cross-functional teams are empowered to chase new ideas outside of the company’s core. Instead of pitch decks and endless approvals, they’re tasked with proving traction.

Early. Fast. Cheap.

What makes Gore’s approach stand out is discipline. Internal startups aren’t pet projects. They’re real ventures expected to validate hypotheses, test risky assumptions, and kill bad ideas quickly. Teams build MVPs that prioritize learning, not launches. They use direct customer feedback and measurable outcomes to steer decisions. The result?

A culture where experimentation isn't tolerated. It’s expected.

The payoff has been real. Gore has successfully incubated businesses beyond performance textiles, entering new spaces like medical devices and industrial filtration. More importantly, they’ve proven that Lean Startup isn’t just for scrappy outsiders. With the right structure and trust, a 60+ year-old company can use Lean to disrupt itself before someone else does.

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