Lean Product Development in Early Stage Startups

Software startups are more popular than ever and growing innumbers. They operate under conditions of extreme uncertainty and face plentyof challenges, underlined by their high failure rate. Using Design ScienceResearch, these challenges were investigated. A literaturestudy showed that inrecent years, several authors have suggested ways to increase the odds ofsucceeding as a startup, such as customer focused development, fact baseddecision making, pivoting and agile/lean thinking. Interviews with industryprofessionals showed that few usedtheseLean Startup practices: many foundthem difficult to implement in practice. In response, we developed the EarlyStage Software Startup Development Model (ESSSDM) for managing earlystage software startups by applying Lean Startup principles. The modelis novelin that itsupports managing a portfolio of product ideas and provides clearcriteria for when to move forward with product ideas, when to abandon productideasas well asrecommends whatconcrete techniques that can be used andwhen, in order to achieve this. The process was instantiated and evaluated on astartup project in an incubator setting