Picture the last time you watched a painter go about her work. She first draws a faint outline. While drawing this outline too, she draws a small curve, pauses, compares to her trial till there, confirms if this new stroke matches her vision, makes any changes and then repeats. The same thing repeats with the real colors too. Each individual unit of effort is a low cost one but thousands of those units togther form the whole piece.
You can look at a sculptor, a potter, a film maker, even programmers… The story is the same. All creative people need immediate feedback to improve the work that they are making right at the moment. Common perception is that feedback is only an afterthought meant to help with improving their craft.
Bret Victor’s iconic talk about the importance of immediate feedback.
Where does the lean startup fit in?
Its very important to understand that what any startup does is very similar to the creative process. A startup normally doesn’t have a reference point to compare to for its business model. Because they are normally creating something where none existed. Once you embrace that its more art than science, the next obvious step is to mimic the creative process in your day to day business decisions. You do something. You see if it improves things. If yes, do more of that something. If no, do less of that. The way you know if it has improved or not is by comparing some relevant number or customer opinion before and after the change. This is the core idea behind The Lean Startup. I wish more startups adopt Lean methodology instead of building things in complete darkness and hoping someone will like their product enough to buy it.