Running Lean, 2nd Edition by Ash Maurya

Summary: Interesting, but too shallow

Every startup has it’s good and bad days. Question is, what to do, when you find that your initial idea is not quite as good as you expected it to be.

Ash tries to answer this question by providing clean path to the success. By describing various aspects of running project he will show you issues that are particularly worth addressing. I have to admit that Ash provides you with lots of valuable information regarding issues you will probably encounter during project.

Generally, problem with this kind of books is that evaluating provided solutions is very hard. You can’t definitely tell that solution will work for you as well. In “Running Lean” you go through various aspects of running business with CloudFire project in a background – serving as example. Question is whether solutions good for CloudFire will be good for you?

One thing I definitely found interesting in the book was Lean canvas – variation on a Business Model Canvas. Comparing to Business Model Canvas it better fits small projects. In fact, Lean canvas can be applied not only to a whole project but to a single task as well. This is quite convenient if you want to describe the tasks before proceeding with solving it.

In general, I think this book addresses some general issues but covers topic too much narrow. It is hard to tell how it fits into general concepts of running projects if you don’t have any other sources related to the topic at your bookshelf.

Product page:

O’Reilly: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920020141.do
Amazon (in Books): Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works (Lean (O’Reilly))
Amazon (Kindle): Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works (Lean (O’Reilly))