Hi there -
Here is this week’s “1 principle, 2 strategies, and 3 actionable tactics” for running lean…
1 Universal Principle
“Traction is the goal.”
The one thing both investors and entrepreneurs obsess over is traction.
However, the concept of traction is poorly understood, gamed, and largely underutilized. This week, I published a video (linked below) to address the first two challenges.
In this issue, I’ll discuss how to use traction to drive focus.
2 Underlying Strategies at Play
I. Forget product roadmaps.
Product roadmaps assume you know exactly what to build. However, for the same reasons that traditional business planning doesn’t work when you’re moving fast and under conditions of extreme uncertainty, neither do product roadmaps.
That’s where traction roadmaps come in.
II. Build a traction roadmap instead.
A traction roadmap charts key business model outcomes as milestones on a timeline. It creates a contract with your key stakeholders on outcome deliverables (what you will achieve) while suspending output deliverables (how you will achieve it) for later.
Having a non-negotiable goal alone forces focus, but the real power of traction is realized when you deconstruct it into five input levers that work together as a system.
3 Actionable Tactics
I. Deconstruct traction into measurable components.
For a given business model, more customers translate to more traction. And you can deconstruct how to make customers into the five steps of the Customer Factory:
Measuring these five steps weekly helps you create a simple yet powerful company-wide dashboard that charts progress against your traction roadmap and identifies key bottlenecks or constraints:
II. Focus on one constraint at a time.
Instead of optimizing every aspect of your business simultaneously, dedicate 80% of your efforts to solving your biggest constraint through targeted experiments.
III. Reevaluate constraints regularly.
As no funnel converts at 100%, constraints are never completely eliminated; however, their priority shifts often and unpredictably.
Your goal isn’t necessarily to optimize a particular step to perfection but rather to improve it enough that it isn’t the slowest step and then move on to the next slowest step.
As a founder, I find this liberating, as it allows you to calibrate your efforts while maximizing traction per unit of effort.
I introduced this GO-LEAN framework in my second book (Scaling Lean), which captures the steps:
- GOAL: Set a 90-day traction goal based on your roadmap
- ORIENT: Identify your current constraint or bottleneck
- LEVERAGE: Formulate a plan for breaking this constraint
- EXPERIMENT: Run experiments to test the plan
- ANALYSIS: Reevaluate constraints based on what you’ve learned
- NEXT ACTION: Decide to keep working on the constraint or move to a new one.
This gives you a continuous cycle for making progress while focusing limited resources on what matters most.
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.
Here's the YouTube video on traction:
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P.P.S.
Whenever you're ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:
1 - Get my Just Start course: If you're new to this framework, you'll learn the key mindsets for building the next generation of products that matter.
2 - Take the Business Model Design Challenge: If you're an aspiring or early-stage founder looking to launch a new idea in 2025, join my next Business Model Design Challenge, where you'll learn how to design and stress-test your idea without wasting resources.
