Faster is not a business plan

07 Oct 2014

You have to learn what’s worth producing, not produce more faster.

In startup culture there’s an emphasis on doing things fast. Build fast, get feedback fast, iterate fast, and thus beat your competition because you’ve provided a revenue producing solution to your customer quickly.

That’s an ultra short version of the LEAN Startup.*

But faster isn’t always better. Producing more software products faster does not mean you’re creating more value. Why? You have to make something customers actually want. The real challenge is defining what people want, not writing more code.

The even more valuable insight is to understand the underlying relationships between what people want and $. Code just becomes a crude description of these relationships and processes.

In a phrase, “faster is not a business plan.”

* I’ve been corrected. The lean startup didn’t portray that quickness as a business plan all by itself. Rather, it proposed a “scientific approach to … get a desired product to customers’ hands faster” (from here).