Jeremy Blanchard's Blog

Running Lean Flowchart

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Have you ever started a new project and wished there were a guidebook for that type of work? I always do.

Travelling through Dark Terrain

I started building RallyRoom 9 months ago, after years of reading startup blogs. I was hyper-aware that I was focused on building an app I thought was cool, and that to succeed in starting a business, I needed to look at the whole picture, not just the code. I spent a couple weeks searching for a “guidebook” to this new land of startups that I had just entered. I found a few neighborhood maps on building, usability, and emotional design, but nothing that told me how to get where I was headed: building a tool that will change the world and pay my bills.

So I set off on my journey, figuring that navigating on-the-fly was better than waiting for a perfect map. After 9 months, I had talked to a bunch of users, learned about design, built a prototype, and was about to start a multi-month development phase to build out the MVP.

Enter: Running Lean

Then I stumbled across Running Lean.

Now I know how to get where I’m going. Before I had a bunch of tools from blogs I had read, but they were all sitting in pile, and I was using my best guess at to when to pull them out. Now I have a toolbox and snapshots of what my product should look like at different stages.

As a technical founder, I love building things. One day I said “I really want to spend a ton of time building this one thing, and I hope someone will pay me for it so I can spend all my time on it.”

Running Lean gave me to tools to shift my attention from building a product to building a business.

Key things I learned: * How to find the right problem to solve * How to build a solution for a market that will pay for it * How to iterate on your first guesses to find ones that work * What the stages are for building a startup, and what my goal is for each stage * The “when” and “why” that I can now pair with all of the “whats” I learned from startup blogs

I highly recommend Running Lean to any startup founder (especially the ones who started as coders), and to any entrepreneur in general.

The Flowchart

To better understand the Running Lean methodology, I decided to illustrate it all on my whiteboard¹ .

Below is a flowchart of the steps, process, and products presented in Running Lean. This is my contribution to the community and others who are trying to absorb this school of thought.

View the full size Running Lean Flowchart

It takes you through the 4 stages presented in Running Lean 1. Understand the problem 2. Define the solution 3. Validate qualitatively 4. Verify quantitatively

This is the first iteration and there are lots of improvements I could make. I wanted to get it into your hands before perfecting it. If you’re a designer or know one, I’d love to work with someone to turn this into an info graphic of sorts. Hit me up if you’re interested.

Ask questions in the comments if anything is unclear on the diagram or if you have suggestions for future iterations.