We will start to think about our FRC team as a business running in an environment of high uncertainty. We will think about our robot as a product of our business and our drivers as its users. The first part of the book introduces the ideas of productivity, waste, and assumptions we make in the design process.
Copy and paste the five questions below into a new blog post. As you read the introduction and first four chapters, write your response to each question below the question. At the bottom of the post, summarize what you learned. Tag the post with "LS1". When finished, write a comment on two other people's posts (you may need to wait a couple days).
- Intro: The Lean Startup is a book about 21st century management. How does building a FRC robot and running a FRC team run into the same challenges Eric Ries identified in modern businesses? How is our FRC team a group of entrepreneurs?
- Chapter 1: What is productivity? When building a FRC robot, what specifically is productivity? Based on this definition, was our team productive during the last build season?
- Chapter 3: What did IMVU assume to be true when they designed their product? How did customers actually behave? Was there a faster and cheaper way to learn the lesson they learned?
- Chapter 3: What is something that we were unsure of last build season that we experimentally validated? Was there a faster way to learn what we learned?
- Chapter 4: Choose the Zappos, HP, Kodak, or Proctor & Gamble case study. What assumptions did the Zappos founders make when they started their business? How did they test their assumptions more efficiently than the IMVU team?
- End with a summary of what you learned.
