Hi there -
Here is this week’s “1 principle, 2 strategies, and 3 actionable tactics” for running lean…
1 Universal Principle
“Right Action, Right Time.”
Like most founders, I used to think that growing a startup meant working on dozens of things simultaneously. Then I discovered something that completely changed how our 3-person team operates.
It was a Monday morning, and with coffee in hand, I was in the middle of reviewing our weekly metrics. For the fourth week in a row, our activation rate had been dropping. We’d gone from 80% to just 35% — meaning 65 out of every 100 new users would never return.
What was most frustrating? We hadn’t been sitting idle. My designer had implemented several usability fixes. I was driving new user acquisition. Our developers were building complementary tools.
We were busy, but we weren’t making progress.
That’s when it hit me: activation had become the key bottleneck in our business model. Even if we signed up more users, we’d lose 65% of them. Even if we built better tools, most users would never see them.
The breakthrough came when I called a team meeting and proposed something radical: focus 80% of our attention on breaking this one constraint and only 20% on everything else.
2 Underlying Strategies at Play
I. Align your entire team around the constraint, not their specialties.
When we first brainstormed solutions, something interesting happened. The developers proposed building more features. The designer suggested UX fixes. I (the marketer) wanted better awareness campaigns.
We were all pitching what we knew best — what I now call the “curse of specialization.”
The magic happens when you bring diverse specialists together to focus on the same problem. Good ideas can come from anywhere, but only when everyone is looking in the same direction.
II. Prioritize ideas based on problem evidence, not solution elegance.
After two hours of circular debates, I had an epiphany. Instead of pitching solutions, what if we focused on gathering evidence for the underlying problems?
We spent a week researching our theories. When we reconvened, our dozen ideas had shrunk to just three, each backed by real evidence.
The winner was our designer’s “Blank Canvas Proposal.” Through user testing, he discovered that new users were experiencing writer’s block. Early adopters were familiar with Lean Canvas from my content, but newer users stared at empty boxes with no guidance.
A problem well-understood is half solved.
3 Actionable Tactics
I. Identify your key constraint.
At any point, there’s always a single bottleneck holding your business model back. This is the one domino that, when tipped, has the biggest immediate impact.
Look at your customer factory metrics. Where are you losing the most potential value? That’s usually your constraint.
II. Make evidence-based bets with timeboxed experiments.
Once you’ve identified your most promising solution, devise a 2-week experiment to test it.
We could have built a complex onboarding flow, but instead, we created a simple helper video and displayed it as a pop-up. Within two weeks, we had a measurable improvement in activation.
Two weeks may seem short, but when you focus on testing the riskiest assumptions, you can validate almost any theory through small, additive experiments.
III. Rinse and repeat.
As you solve problems and break constraints, the bottleneck will shift to another part of your business model.
That’s your cue to find the next constraint and repeat the process.
This is how you can continuously prioritize the most impactful work, leverage your team’s strengths, and accomplish more with less busy work.
The counterintuitive truth? Doing less — but focusing that effort on the right constraint — will yield 10 times faster results than spreading yourself thin across multiple initiatives.
This is the essence of “right action, right time.”
That’s all for today. See you next week.
Ash
Author of Running Lean and creator of Lean Canvas
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P.S. This week's video:
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P.P.S.
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