Torve Indahl on Please share your opinion on what prevents lean startups in enterprise
Business cases are in most large corp the key follow-up tool to measure your projects success and growth. When business managers do the traditional thinking and “lock” the business case at the project starting point, they then also lock or restrain the projects ability to learn and change. Eg. working with a norwegian telecom post acquisition for my 2006 startup in 2008, we where following the telecom´s 1 year old pre-acquisition business case and followed that path for 4 years. The company does not exist today. Many factors played in, yes, but fore sure the set path was one.
Working with lean startup for large and SME on a daily basis and as an MSc in Business, I frequently us this mindset (lean Startup) as an invisible hand. We don´t explain everything, we just use it. We change the business cases at every board/steering group meetings and wait for them to start asking questions about way there are all this changes. We are proud then to look them right in the eye and tell them “Sorry, we were wrong the last time“. We then show them the evidence from our market experiments on why we where wrong and let them in on the discussions on what to do next. Now you suddenly are on the road of trust, changes is expected and the board executives starts digging into if we are doing enough experiments….”what about the MVP then” (yes, they start using your words).
The best part is when our “success formula for new stuff” then becomes demand. Life is good
