The ‘lean startup’ approach reminds me of Jacob Steinhardt’s post about his approach to research, of which the key takeaways are:
When working on a research project, you should basically either be in “de-risking mode” (determining if the project is promising as quickly as possible) OR “execution mode” (assuming the project is promising and trying to do it quickly). This probably looks like trying to do an MVP version of the project quickly, and then iterating on that if it’s promising.
If a project doesn’t work out, ask why. That way you:
avoid trying similar things that will fail for the same reasons.
will find out whether it didn’t work because your implementation was broken, or the high-level approach you were taking isn’t promising.
Try hard, early, to try to show that your project won’t solve the problem.
The ‘lean startup’ approach reminds me of Jacob Steinhardt’s post about his approach to research, of which the key takeaways are:
When working on a research project, you should basically either be in “de-risking mode” (determining if the project is promising as quickly as possible) OR “execution mode” (assuming the project is promising and trying to do it quickly). This probably looks like trying to do an MVP version of the project quickly, and then iterating on that if it’s promising.
If a project doesn’t work out, ask why. That way you:
avoid trying similar things that will fail for the same reasons.
will find out whether it didn’t work because your implementation was broken, or the high-level approach you were taking isn’t promising.
Try hard, early, to try to show that your project won’t solve the problem.