Start Continuous Product Development

By selling your MVP to your first paying customers and speaking with them, you’ve validated your startup’s value hypothesis. Along the way, you may have also discovered new opportunities to improve or automate your product so it can serve a larger audience.

Now it’s time to put your product development team to work — improving both the product and the business model, and testing new hypotheses. Every change and every new feature should be treated as an experiment designed to move you closer to your vision. In Lean Startup methodology, this systematic experimentation is known as the Build–Measure–Learn feedback loop.

 

The Build–Measure–Learn Feedback Loop

Whether you realized it or not, you’ve already gone through this loop in earlier stages. For example:

• You built a product demo for customer interviews (Build).
• You measured interest by tracking how many interviewees expressed genuine interest or willingness to pay (Measure).
• You learned whether enough customers cared to justify further development (Learn).

The Build–Measure–Learn loop applies to all aspects of product and business model development. You can use it for testing assumptions as small as “this is the best marketing channel” or as big as “this feature will significantly improve customer retention.”

The loop works like this:

• Build – Develop the product or feature needed to test your hypothesis.
• Measure – Gather data via tools like cohort analysis, A/B testing, or customer interviews to see how users respond.
• Learn – Validate or reject your hypothesis based on results, and plan your next move.

 

Scrum: A Framework for Agile Development

Lean Startup doesn’t provide detailed instructions on how to manage the day-to-day development process. That’s where Scrum — the world’s most popular agile development framework — comes in. Scrum isn’t just for software teams; it’s also used in hardware, service design, and even marketing projects.

In Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, Jeff Sutherland outlines exactly how to run Scrum in your organization. The book covers:

• Team Roles – Who owns the product backlog (prioritizing customer needs) and who is responsible for delivering features.
• Sprints – Short, iterative development cycles where features are planned, built, and tested.
• Tools & Prioritization – How to manage your backlog and ensure development focuses on the highest-impact work.

Scrum provides a clear, organized way to run the Build–Measure–Learn loop. If you haven’t yet read Sutherland’s book, now is the time — it’s one of the most practical resources for implementing continuous product development.