The Lean Startup - Eric Ries [76]
Toyota discovered that small batches made their factories more efficient. In contrast, in the Lean Startup the goal is not to produce more stuff efficiently. It is to—as quickly as possible—learn how to build a sustainable business.
Think back to the example of envelope stuffing. What if it turns out that the customer doesn’t want the product we’re building? Although this is never good news for an entrepreneur, finding out sooner is much better than finding out later. Working in small batches ensures that a startup can minimize the expenditure of time, money, and effort that ultimately turns out to have been wasted.
Small Batches at IMVU
At IMVU, we applied these lessons from manufacturing to the way we work. Normally, new versions of products like ours are released to customers on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly cycle.
Take a look at your cell phone. Odds are, it is not the very first version of its kind. Even innovative companies such as Apple produce a new version of their flagship phones about once a year. Bundled up in that product release are dozens of new features (at the release of iPhone 4, Apple boasted more than 1,500 changes).
Ironically, many high-tech products are manufactured in advanced facilities that follow the latest in lean thinking, including small batches and single-piece flow. However, the process that is used to design the product is stuck in the era of mass production. Think of all the changes that are made to a product such as the iPhone; all 1,500 of them are released to customers in one giant batch.
Behind the scenes, in the development and design of the product itself, large batches are still the rule. The work that goes into the development of a new product proceeds on a virtual assembly line. Product managers figure out what features are likely to please customers; product designers then figure out how those features should look and feel. These designs are passed to engineering, which builds something new or modifies an existing product and, once this is done, hands it off to somebody responsible for verifying that the new product works the way the product managers and designers intended. For a product such as the iPhone, these internal handoffs may happen on a monthly or quarterly basis.
Think back one more time to the envelope-stuffing exercise. What is the most efficient way to do this work?
At IMVU, we attempted to design, develop, and ship our new features one at a time, taking advantage of the power of small batches. Here’s what it looked like.
Instead of working in separate departments, engineers and designers would work together side by side on one feature at a time. Whenever that feature was ready to be tested with customers, they immediately would release a new version of the product, which would go live on our website for a relatively small number of people. The team would be able immediately to assess the impact of their work, evaluate its effect on customers, and decide what to do next. For tiny changes, the whole process might be repeated several times per day. In fact, in the aggregate, IMVU makes about fifty changes to its product (on average) every single day.
Just as with the Toyota Production System, the key to being able to operate this quickly is to check for defects immediately, thus preventing bigger problems later. For example, we had an extensive set of automated tests that assured that after every change our product still worked as designed. Let’s say an engineer accidentally removed an important feature, such as the checkout button on one of our e-commerce pages. Without this button, customers no longer could buy anything from IMVU. It’s as if our business instantly became a hobby. Analogously to the Toyota andon cord, IMVU used an elaborate set of defense mechanisms that prevented engineers