Crossing the Chasm Meets The Lean Start-Up

To the degree that Crossing the Chasm could have been called the go-to book for entrepreneurs in the 1990s, one could argue the same role for Eric Ries’s The Lean Start-Up for the first decade of this century. Both books describe an emerging market dynamic and prescribe a very specific approach to capitalizing on it. Of course, that is all history. The really interesting question is, what is the book for the current decade?

Actually, I’d like to argue it is the combination of these two books, a one-two punch if you will. Here’s how I see it playing out.

The Lean Start-Up is all about compressing the early stages of an innovation cycle by engaging the target customer right from the start. A key ingredient in Ries’s prescription is the minimum viable product, something to put in the hands of early adopters for immediate feedback to help direct the next stage of an iterative, agile development process. Every chapter in the book vibrates with the energy of this kind of acceleration, whether to outpace a next generation of competition or to escape from the clutches of a past paradigm’s conventional wisdom.

For consumer products, particularly those that are digital end to end, this playbook can take you straight into the tornado—no chasms, no bowling alleys, just Zappos and you are there! More generally, for the user-facing portion of any enterprise system, this lean approach is excellent for keeping your development effort on a path to value. What it is not suited for, on the other hand, is doing the heavy lifting required to displace or engage with legacy infrastructure. That is where Crossing the Chasm comes in.

A key concept that structures that book might be called the minimum viable whole product. This refers to that set of products and services needed to fulfill a specific target market segment’s compelling reason to buy. In an enterprise crossing-the-chasm context, this means an end-to-end solution to a heretofore intractable problem that is becoming increasingly impossible to ignore, a solution that integrates appropriately with the customer’s surrounding legacy systems.

Such whole product solutions inevitably entail collaboration with other parties in the marketplace who provide complementary products and services, integration support, change management consulting, and the like. Securing this collaboration is only possible when the entrepreneurial vendor can provide ready access to an untapped market opportunity that promises material gains to the partners involved. This requires target market focus, specific domain expertise, and sustained effort, not to mention a target customer who is deeply motivated to stay the course. It is not for the flighty or faint of heart.

In short, the cadences and style of these two prescriptions are very different, so different one might ask why would you ever want to pair them? The answer is, because the world needs us to. For the foreseeable future (the rest of this decade and probably much of the following one), enterprises across the globe will be spending the bulk of their budgets deploying systems of engagement to digitize their business models. These systems must both delight their end users and integrate securely and reliably with legacy systems of record. That’s a lot of work, as in trillions of dollars, not billions. The front end needs The Lean Start-Up. The back end needs Crossing the Chasm.

So fire up your Kindles, folks, and Eric and I will give a heads up to Amazon.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

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Geoffrey Moore | Escape Velocity | Geoffrey Moore Twitter | Geoffrey Moore YouTube