Lean Inception is About Making People Awesome

Lean Inception is a method to build a product focusing on Minimum Viable Products. MVPs like Lean Startup. It can help small or large organisations to realise what’s the priority to build next. It addresses a week-planned agenda with Product Development and UX techniques like Elevator Pitch, Personas, User Journeys, Brainstorming and Sequencing of Features, and the Canvas MVP, the proper result of a Lean Inception.

It was developed by the easygoing-geek genius Paulo Caroli from need. With his newborn son in 2011, it was virtually impossible to balance work and family running an old-fashioned Inception for weeks. More constrains, more creativity. Lean Inception was created to accomplish a product inception in a week.

A facilitator leads the process. Key business and product people do a kick-off presentation in the beginning about what shall be about the product, and for who. The team attends the entire 5 days agenda, presenting the results to those interested in the MVP(s).

However, even Lean Inception is a method, it’s not just about to build the next MVPs. As Dwight D. Eisenhower said “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything”. A perfect MVP planned is worthless without people engagement.

Lean Inception is about making people awesome, engaging them to build an awesome product.

Awesome because they are part of the process, part of the product. They feel like owners of the product, because they helped to decide what to build. Even business knows what to build and UX decided for who, it’s very important encouraging the team develop the product too, doing the Elevator Pitch and sketching Personas.

Discover more about Lean Inception at martinfowler.com/articles/lean-inception/ or reading the Lean Inception book.