How to use lean startup tools in your company and apply them to company initiatives ?

How many times you have seen initiatives that were launched by any departments (HR, Quality, Marketing, IT, ...etc) then eventually failed to survive. Sometimes, we assume we know everything, we know what other needs, Then when we propose an idea and get the approval to launch it without consulting end-users, we might fail and wast the company resources. So how can we test our assumption for the success of a particular idea?

There is a tool called " The Build-Measure-Learn Feedback Loop" which is one of the central principles of Lean Startup.

Build-Measure-Learn is "a framework for establishing – and continuously improving – the effectiveness of new products, services, and ideas quickly and cost-effectively".

We recommend using this framework to test our assumptions about any proposed initiatives. This could be done by building something small in scale for potential department/users-beneficiaries to try, measuring their reactions, and then learning from the results. This will help us prevent investing unneeded time, money, other resources, and will enable us to continuously improve our proposed initiatives so that we eventually deliver precisely what our users-beneficiaries really want.

Follow these steps to use the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop:

1. Define the idea of your initiative that you want to test and the information that you need to learn. You do this by developing a hypothesis. " I assume this initiative will help the company to achieve x,y,z ....etc"
2. Your goal here is to create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) – the smallest possible portion of your initiative that allows you to test your hypothesis. It could be a working prototype or a basic advertisement or landing page. It could be a presentation slideshow, a mock brochure, a sample dataset, a storyboard, or a video that illustrates what you offer. Whatever MVP you choose, it needs to show just enough core features to attract the interest of your users-beneficiaries.
3. Measure the results against your hypothesis to decide whether to persevere or pivot until you reach a satisfaction point that your proposed initiative will succeed.

• Persevere means: Your hypothesis was correct, so you decide to press on with the same goals. You repeat the feedback loop to continuously improve and refine your initiative's idea.
• Pivot means: The experiment has refuted your hypothesis, but you've still gained valuable knowledge about what doesn't work. You can reset, or correct your course and repeat the loop, using what you've learned to test new hypotheses and carry out different experiments.

Finally, the biggest advantage of this approach prior to launch any compnay intitiatives in a full sclae, is to minimize the risk and cost of creating intiativis that no one wants and help you to to come up with the best version that your users-beneficiaries will embrace.