So has it been purely an organic process for you to learn this approach?
Reading about lean and hearing about the theories is valuable, but I think it's actually doing things and learning from them that actually builds the connections in your head. I started my first business, the online DVD rental business Fatso, when I was 22, and we've been constantly learning ever since.
Doing things quickly has enormous advantages and I think there's almost more risk in doing things slowly and more completely without really knowing how it's going to work in the real world. There's more risk in that because you don't get to grow a business before a product is launched, and you don't get to hear from customers what they like and what they don't.
What are some practical things you do in the business to make it lean?
Our development work is split into weekly cycles. That's a really small cycle to work in, so you really question the importance of what you're going to be working on, with a focus always on iterating and improving how we currently do things. All the tasks that we come up with for those cycles come from three places in the business: our customer service team, our operations team, and our product team.
And with new products we always ask ourselves 'how we can launch things in weeks, not months?'. Often technical businesses will come up with technical requirements that are necessary for scale, but they're not often necessary at launch.
What benefits do you see from taking this approach?
By doing stuff really quickly and being iterative, you don't have the ongoing overhead of developing code that you constantly need to change and rewrite; it means the code you write is going to be more useful.
The other benefit is to the culture of the business. It shows customers that you listen and you make changes for them. It also shows the team you move quickly and you can actually say 'we don't know the answer. Let's learn together, and give us your feedback and thoughts about what will make things better'. It gives people a sense of ownership of what they're doing, and that's really powerful in a human sense.
What are the challenges?
There is a high workload on your staff, which means a lot of stress, and as a manager you have to wear a lot of that stress because obviously you don't want too much of that falling back on the team. As a manager it's about keeping things calm and reminding everyone why that approach works. That has to come from the top; you can't just say 'we're going to be lean' and then be very conservative in everything you do, because everyone will get stressed out and it will all fall apart.
What do you do as a manager to help that?
I always remind myself that people look to their manager and they notice very subtle things, like how you walk in, how you greet people, and they'll pick up the mood of the business from that. So even if you are feeling stressed, sometimes it's less stressful to not show that, and find some other outlet for that pressure - like sports, or finding someone outside the business who you can talk to. You do have to be an optimist; it makes it a lot easier to keep calm under pressure.
What advice would you have for other tech entrepreneurs looking to think lean?
If you're in a technology space I think the the most important question to ask is 'is this really necessary?' Those four words are really important because when you have an idea you'll want to build all these features into it because you have this vision of an end product, but building those features up front won't make you nimble or successful earlier; it actually delays success. I think speed is a vastly underrated factor in business.
