> If that’s what you’re looking for, we recommend Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup, a must-read in our opinion.
There are better books, I think. I've just read Nail It Then Scale It, which is mostly better than Ries' book. Steve Blank's new book also comes to mind, and Running Lean also comes highly recommended from others I know. Ries' book is too generic and leaves you without much of substance once you're done with it.
I felt The Lean Startup could've been written in one-fourth of the amount of pages Ries used. There was a lot of fluff to wade through and I kept thinking "Come on, come on! Where's the good stuff? Where are the principles and case studies?" Perhaps I took the book a bit too seriously and had high expectations going in – I took notes and was really intent on studying the book – so perhaps one would get more out of it if used for more casual reading.
I'm not so enthusiastic about The Lean Startup. It's worth reading, certainly, but it gets annoying as Ries spends a fair amount of time concentrating on "intrapreneurs" at large corporations, and insisting that divisions in large enterprises are analogous to startups.
Fine, fine. But don't call your book The Lean Startup, then. Or, if you're going to write a book with that title, write about actual startups, and get more in-depth.
The cynical view: big corporations have a lot more money to spend on, say, consultants helping them discover their inner startup than actual startups do.
That certainly makes sense, and I can't blame the author for spending time on them. I just wish it was a tad bit clearer that this was the direction the book was taking; its cover and marketing material focus on small startups.
Great stuff. We use an xmpp chat room on jabber, github with hooks to jabber, and a knowledge engine that i build myself which is basically a search engine that will index anything you submit. Oh and Asana of course because its dynamic. Does the book mention any cool integrations or mashups between the three?
Sounds like you work a lot like us only with different tools. We have a synergies chapter that covers some of the mashups between tools, namely github hooks into Hipchat. However we don't go into details as to more complicated mashups, we just mention APIs. This guide isn't really targeted to very savvty people like it sounds you are but rather toward workflow noobies!
That's what happened to us. Huge difference for us between Skype chat (no hook with Github)/paper todos and Hipchat (which tells us about new stuff onGithub)/Trello. But the best way to experience it is to try the tools :)
There are better books, I think. I've just read Nail It Then Scale It, which is mostly better than Ries' book. Steve Blank's new book also comes to mind, and Running Lean also comes highly recommended from others I know. Ries' book is too generic and leaves you without much of substance once you're done with it.