Agent skill · wondelai
lean-startup
Design MVPs, validated learning experiments, and pivot-or-persevere decisions using Build-Measure-Learn. Use when the user mentions "MVP scope", "validated learning", "pivot or persevere", "vanity metrics", "test assumptions", "innovation accounting", "build-measure-learn", "minimum viable experiment", "should we pivot", "test a business idea cheaply", or "build the smallest version first". Also trigger when deciding what to include in a first version, measuring startup progress, or evaluating whether to change direction on a product bet. Covers innovation accounting and actionable metrics. For 5-day prototype testing, see design-sprint. For customer motivation analysis, see jobs-to-be-done.
What it needs
About 10k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
Lean Startup Methodology A systematic approach to building startups and launching new products that shortens development cycles and rapidly discovers whether a business model is viable. Core Principle Entrepreneurship is a form of management. Success doesn't require a perfect plan or brilliant insight—it requires a systematic process for testing assumptions, learning from customers, and iterating rapidly. Most startups fail not because they couldn't build what they planned, but because they built the wrong thing: treat every plan as a set of hypotheses to falsify, and spend effort to eliminate waste and accelerate validated learning, not to execute a fixed roadmap. Scoring Goal: 10/10. Score a plan, experiment, or metric set by the five Quick Diagnostic rows—1 point each when the answer is yes, 2 points when it is also backed by evidence on the Validation Ladder (Level 3+): 9-10: every leap-of-faith assumption named and ranked by risk, the riskiest tested by a real MVP, actionable metrics defined, and explicit pivot criteria set before building. 5-6: a hypothesis and some MVP exist, but metrics are vanity or pivot criteria are undefined—decisions can't be made from the data. ≤3: waterfall thinking—building the full product first, asking customers what they want, or scaling before product/market fit. State the current score and the lowest-scoring diagnostic row to fix next. The Build-Measure-Learn Loop The fundamental cycle: IDEAS → BUILD (product) → MEASURE (data) → LEARN (knowledge) → back to IDEAS. Critical insight: Plan the loop backward: 1. What do we want to learn? (hypothesis to test) 2. How will we know if we learned it? (metrics) 3. What's the minimum we can build? (MVP) Goal: Minimize total time through the loop. See references/build-measure-learn.md when planning an experiment—reverse-planning sequence, an experiment-design template, per-product-type loop examples, and the build/vanity-metric loop traps. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills wondelai/lean-startup--3ece0c