Summing Up

The lean startup is guided by three principles:

1. Fail fast. Move from Plan–Fund–Do to quick, educated guesses that generate data about your innovation’s effectiveness.

2. Agile development. Quickly Build-Measure-Learn, and do it all over again until you find the optimal product or service, or until you fail, fast.

3. Efficiency. Preserve financial, social, and political capital by spending the least amount for the most result.

The overall process is customer development—a way of testing your guesses with the right people at the right time for each stage of growth in your program. By and large, these principles and process are interchangeable with those used by lean startup practitioners in the private sector, and this chapter has examined them in some depth. Before we plunge into the practices of lean startups, in the next chapter we’ll take a look at key ways the social sector differs from the private sector, and the importance of those differences for lean practitioners in each.