> I always find it interesting when a methodology XYZ is critiqued its adherents invariably claim "that's not really XYZ."
If the example given to justify the criticism isn't actually applying what XYZ calls for, its a perfectly legitimate response. Often, the problem may still be with the methodology, and it may just be that the methodology isn't practical to implement because it makes unrealistic assumptions, but the evidence needed to support that goes beyond a examples of incomplete attempts to implement it not producing the desired results, and requires something to show why attempts to implement it are doomed to be incomplete.
The problem is, you can discredit any failed startup by saying their MVP just wasn't viable enough. Well, duh. Knowing what's viable and building it is the difficult part, but isn't that what lean methodology is supposed to help with to begin with? Lean methodology inadvertently makes it seem like the hard part is the easy part, and therefore confuses people.
> Knowing what's viable and building it is the difficult part, but isn't that what lean methodology is supposed to help with to begin with?
Lean approaches (including, but not limited to, lean startup) provide basic rubrics about where to focus your efforts to optimize return for effort. They aren't, however, a magic wand that substitutes for skill, judgement, and domain expertise (well, perhaps a little for the last, since inherently lean uses the scientific method to grow domain knowledge in a highly-focussed way, but unless you've got a deep reserve of resources to fund failures that you learn from, or get really lucky, you are still likely to fail without domain expertise going in.)
The biggest problem with lean now is it is being treated as if it were a formulaic, recipe-driven methodology that substitutes for specialized skill, when lean is pretty much an anti-recipe approach that is all about everything you do being part of a continuous hypothesis-test-review improvement cycle, including the kind of things you might get from a book discussing practices that others developed via lean, which may provide a starting point for your practices, but not a fixed methodology.
