Mike Zornek

Impactful Books

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 14:39:36 -0400

A local developer Slack had an icebreaker post asking for programming books that impacted your career. I figured I’d share mine in a more long-lived format. Some are more timeless than others.

Web Development and Programming

Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman – I recall reading this in 2003 when I was just out of college and starting to invest full-time in my web development career. This book brought order to the chaos of the web design patterns of the time.
Unit Testing: Principles, Practices, and Patterns by Vladimir Khorikov – This was a powerful book that helped me solidify my perspective of testing, what I want out of it, and how to accomplish those wants.
Elixir in Action by Saša Jurić – While it was not my first Elixir book, it was by far the one that sold me on the language and run time. It’s one of my favorite books of all time. The new third edition just came out. I can’t wait to reread it.
Thinking In Systems by Donella H. Meadows – This is not a programming book, but good exploration of perspectives you should keep in mind when building things.
Cocoa Programming for OS X: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide by Aaron Hillegass – While I earned a living building web applications using PHP and Rails, outside of work, I was (as a hobby) learning how to create GUI apps on Mac OS X. This book was a life-changing experience for me. First, giving me a space to learn Cocoa, which eventually became my full-time work, but then secondly, when I joined Big Nerd Ranch to become a teacher myself.
Clean Code by Robert C. Martin – This book gets some shade these days, but I recall it being one of the first books that started to get me to question the aesthetics of my code and I think highly of that event.

User Interfaces

Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug – I loved how approachable and immediately actionable this book was for my early work.
The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman – This book forever changed how I look at doors.
The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin P. Williams – Wonderful introduction to core design concepts.
Refactoring UI by Adam Wathan – Great focused review of common presentation patterns.

Product Development

The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick – Will help ensure you know how to ask questions and get feedback. TL;DR: Everyone is lying to you.
The Nature of Software Development by Ron Jeffries – This is not a product development methodology but a great collection of values by which to organize your processes.
Just Fucking Ship by Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman – Sharp, focused advice on how to work backward and get that project shipped.
Shape Up by Ryan Singer – Curiously enough, I’ve joined multiple teams that tried Shape Up, and it did not take just before my joining. Personally, I do think there are some good aspects to shape up, like pitch writing and UI breadboarding. If I had sovereignty over a team project, I’d like to get more experience with this style.

Honorable Mention

The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky – Writing this list, I can not recall specific essays, but I have vivid memories of enjoying this collection. It represents to me a golden age of technical blogging. I miss those days. Maybe it is time for a re-read?

Is there something I missed? Let me know your favorites.

How to Run a Successful Book Club

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 12:21:13 -0500

I’ve been a member (and organizer) of many professional-oriented book clubs in my career. I find them a valuable way to connect with peers, keep up with my reading goals, discover new ideas, and learn from other points of view.

Running a book club can be a relatively low-cost and high-value experience. To help, I thought I’d document how I tend to prefer book clubs. These recommendations lean more towards work and professional book clubs and not the social and entertainment variety — though I’m sure some ideas translate.

Picking your books

If you want to get started, I’d recommend just picking a book you are interested in reading and forming a group around it. You might consider trying to assemble a group and letting them pick the first book, but I think it’s better to attract people with a specific title than a foggy concept.

As you finish a book, ask the group for next book suggestions and develop a prospect list. I recommend asking folks to submit a ranked vote against the prospect list (allowing people to vote with priorities), and then you, as the moderator, can choose a book using those signals. You might even consider non-books, like video courses, and work through the material as a cohort.

Aside: I actually built my own tool to run these ranked votes. You can use it too. It is free with no account creation necessary: RankedVote.app

Remember, you don’t need to pick the book that wins the vote. Sometimes, identifying a book that you identify will generate better discussions, benefit members who need help in that area, or draw more people to the club (introduction books tend to draw a bigger audience) might be a better choice for the group’s needs.

Scheduling and Group Size

Like early book choices, you should just pick a good time for you and get started. Be mindful of time zones if you want to attract people across continents. Also, avoid other meetup groups of the same topic that might overlap. I personally like weekly for work-related book clubs, but if the group is more casual, I think bi-weekly is fine, too. Eventually, as you start new books, you can revisit the schedule to accommodate better those who are showing up.

The ideal group size is probably 8 to 10 people (to ensure you have enough conversations), but you can get by with as few as 2-3 when getting started. Also, expect people to fall off during a book. It happens as people have other responsibilities and interests, and usually, this book club is rightfully a low priority. Don’t let it get you down. If they drop, wish them well and welcome them back when you start a new book. Don’t take it personally.

Venue and Video Tools

All the book clubs I’ve ever participated in or run have been online. For venue, I prefer Zoom for video quality consistency (and recording tools), but Discord is nice for having a place for people to chat between meeting times.

In recent book clubs, we’ve started recording the sessions. I make it clear that the meeting is being recorded and why. I also offered the attendees the option to request that parts be scrubbed if needed.

The main goal of the recordings is to help people who miss a week or two stay connected for an eventual return. We may also start to clip some of the conversations for social sharing and promotion, but it has not happened yet.

We publish the recordings inside our chat system and not on the public internet. I’m a little hesitant to post a full public recording as it will shape the discussion, and sometimes, people like to vent about their current work or past projects. Frankly, just having any recording will impact what people say, so you may choose not to do this to keep the floor more open—still figuring this out myself.

Running a Meeting

The format for most of my book clubs is an hour-long meeting. We try to rotate volunteers to summarize each chapter before opening the discussions. A typical meeting covers 2-3 chapters with 10-minute chapter summaries and 10-15 minutes of discussion per chapter. We do not enforce this schedule. If the room is having productive, even off-topic discussions, we let them play out. If I am summarizing a chapter and have a PDF version of the book, I often like to share my screen so they can see the page visuals and code snippets of interest.

I’ve heard of other groups that mix in a bit of out-of-meeting work. Something like a shared Google document where people are encouraged to capture their notes and thoughts outside the meeting so the meeting time can focus on the most valuable interactions. I even have a peer who was working on software that helps structure that kind of workflow, though I have not used it myself.

In general, a shared collaborative Google doc (or substitute) is valuable for any online meeting, in my experience.

Marketing and Promotion

I think it’s helpful to have a website presence to point to when promoting the book club. You don’t need much more than a single page sharing:

The goals of the club.
The current book.
When and where you meet, ideally with a calendar-friendly link.
Who to contact with questions.

Check out the Elixir Book Club page for a sample. GitHub and GitHub Pages are a great solution for this.

When it’s time to promote your club and/or a new book choice, I would promote it to the same circles in your community that share educational content and links. Think forums, Slacks, Discords, social media accounts, hash tags, etc.

Shared Responsibilities

In addition to volunteers doing chapter summaries, if you can find other ways to get other people involved in the management work of the book club, (eg: updating the website, editing the recording, etc) the chances for the book club to continue well into the future goes way up. Elixir Book Club has been going strong for years, even as different leadership has come and gone.

Those are my notes. I hope they inspire you to start or join a book club. If you have any thoughts or tips I missed, do consider shooting me an email. Thanks.

Elixir Book Club: Testing Elixir, Starts November 13th

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 11:48:17 -0400

I am pleased to share the reboot of the Elixir Book Club.

Starting Sunday, November 13th at 10:30am (Eastern Time), we’ll meet for an hour via Discord to talk about our next book…

Testing Elixir

Testing Elixir Book Cover

https://pragprog.com/titles/lmelixir/testing-elixir/

I read this back in April of 2021 and thought well of it. It’s a good overview of the various testing tools available and how to apply them to Elixir scenarios and patterns (OTP, Ecto, Phoenix).

During the first meeting will review chapters 1 and 2. After that, we will meet to review two or so more chapters every two weeks.

To participate, you’ll need to join the Elixir Book Club Discord, and shortly I expect the main book club website to be current with our new book and dates.

Extra Credit?

If you are interested in software testing, I HIGHLY recommend this other book as well: Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns.

Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns Book Cover

https://www.manning.com/books/unit-testing

Where Testing Elixir will help you learn the tooling and explain the how, Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns will help you discover the why and ultimately assist you in crafting a resilient testing strategy for your projects.

I read this book in June 2022, and it hugely influenced me and how I want to test moving forward. It could serve as a great companion or follow-up book for people in our club, though the club’s focus is officially and exclusively on Testing Elixir.

Hope to see you at the book club!

Book Thoughts: Company of One

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 28 Nov 2021 14:35:05 -0500

Company of One Book Cover

This weekend I finished Company of One by Paul Jarvis. The book pitches:

What if the real key to a richer and more fulfilling career was not to create and scale a new start-up, but rather, to be able to work for yourself, determine your own hours, and become a (highly profitable) and sustainable company of one? Suppose the better—and smarter—solution is simply to remain small? This book explains how to do just that.

I bought the book on a whim after seeing a GoodReads friend recommend it. I thought it would be a timely book to fuel my introspection as I shut down one major project and consider what is next.

Overall I found the book to be enjoyable and engaging. I even picked up a new podcast subscription to hear the author talk more about the ideas described in the book.

I do think the book’s pitch feels a bit overreaching. Rereading it now, it feels downright misleading. There are some solid recommendations about going out on your own. However, the big idea that makes the book a recommendation for me is how it challenges us to rethink growth. Why do we want to grow sales, get more customers, hire more people? What are we doing, why, and is it sustainable? Are we hiring people so we can do less work or the company can do more work?

I align with the bootstrapper community over venture capital startups. VC’s addition to growth is a big part of that, but I think this book also brings home the idea for bootstrappers.

Even in a bootstrapped company, it would be easy to end up building a machine that you do not enjoy running. You may start the company because it gives you a stage to work with a specific technology and an audience you enjoy. Suddenly you grow too fast, without understanding WHY you want to grow, and all of sudden you are spending your days doing things that do not spark joy, like managing a large group of employees or drowning in customer support.

As I step back and consider what is next for me, I think it’ll be essential to brainstorm my ideal day, week, month, and year and build the company and products that can enable that life.

For style critique, I found the book to be a little heavy on the references of other writings and research. Specifically, it felt repetitive to have such works referenced and then very thin, terse insights made. I get that this builds a more persuasive picture over time, but it was a repetitious pattern that felt like padding.

It also did not help that some of the references felt a little dated. Knowing what we know now, maybe Basecamp isn’t a good reference for a model working environment. Bringing up Google’s 20% time for personal projects without talking about how it is no longer an active practice feels disingenuous.

For style appreciation, I like how the chapters end with introspecting questions under the headline “Begin to think about…”. Ultimately I find the most successful books help you dream up questions to ask way more than books that pretend to have all the answers.

I think this can be a helpful book for those like myself who are contemplating work opportunities, projects, or a new company. However, the valuable topics brought up are much more about growth than the title ‘Company of One’ really suggests.

Android Book Club Update

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 09:22:55 -0400

A few updates on our Android Book Club. (Original announcement post.)

Things are going well.
Will be migrating from Programming Kotlin to Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (4th Edition) in the coming weeks.
We have room for a few more people, if you want to join us!

Android Book Club Website / Membership Application:

link-removed

Kotlin Tools for Android Book Club

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 04 Jul 2020 11:32:28 -0400

A quick tour of some of the tools you’ll want to use to help learn Kotlin.

Links

An Android Book Club for iOS Developers

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 10:03:23 -0400

I’m starting a new book club that will teach Android development using Kotlin for current iOS developers. Details below.

This is a book club dedicated to learning Kotlin and Android application development. Specifically, I am hoping to attract current iOS developers who are looking to expand their knowledge and use their current experiences with Swift and iOS to help shape the conversations at the weekly meetings. That said, previous Swift and iOS experience is not required, but just expect some comparisons to come up.

About the Host

My name is Mike Zornek and I am from from Philadelphia, PA. I am the developer behind the Guildflow website that hosts this book club and am selfishly using this book club in part to help test it out.

I am a long time Mac and iOS developer. I am interested in learning Kotlin and Android so I can help build a companion app for Guildflow. I am also interested in being more familiar with Kotlin and Android as I often work on consulting projects that develop both iOS and Android versions.

The Books

This book club will happen in two part. The first part will be about 6-8 weeks and focus on the Kotlin language itself and use the book Programming Kotlin by Venkat Subramaniam along with coding challenges from the Exercism Kotlin track. The second part of the book club will be closer to 12 weeks long and focus on Android application development and will use the book Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (4th Edition). Note the 4th edition, as it was updated to use Kotlin.

Details

The meetings will happen every Monday at 8pm-9pm (Eastern Time) and happen through a video chat using Whereby.

We’ll also provide a Slack chat room for in-between meeting discussions to be shared later.

To join the group use the Membership Application:

link-removed

Once you are accepted into the group you can RSVP for events as well as view the membership list and other members-only details.

Questions / Feedback?

Send email to: mike@mikezornek.com.

Book Club Website: link-removed

Book Notes: Dreaming in Code

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 10:41:17 -0400

Dreaming in Code is a book by Scott Rosenberg. On the book website he write:

Why is software so hard?

Hard to make well. Hard to deliver on time. Hard to use.

Our civilization runs on software. Yet the art of creating it continues to be a dark mystery, even to the experts, and the greater our ambitions, the more spectacularly we seem to fail.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software sets out to understand why, through the story of one software project – Mitch Kapor’s Chandler, an ambitious, open-source effort to rethink the world of e-mail and scheduling.

I spent three years following the work of the Chandler developers as they scaled programming peaks and slogged through software swamps. In Dreaming in Code I tell their stories.

I finished the book last night and found it very enjoyable. Its not a must read by any means but for those programmers who like to learn about process and project management, from a storyteller perspective you might enjoy. The best chapters I think are those dedicated to the general history and art of programming.

Towards the end of the book I started using the Kindle highligher (which is a first for me). Here are some excerpts:

“When you learn about computer science,” Lanier said in a 2003 interview, “you learn about the file as if it were an element of nature, like a photon. That’s a dangerous mentality. Even if you really can’t do anything about it, and you really can’t practically write software without files right now, it’s still important not to let your brain be bamboozled. You have to remember what’s a human invention and what isn’t.”

~

He discovered that we ask more work of students who want to become writers and poets than of those who aim to become software developers: They must study with mentors, they must present their work for regular criticism by peers in workshops, and they’re expected to labor over multiple revisions of the same work. “I think we need to be ashamed of this,” Gabriel says. “What we put forward as computer education is a farce.”

~

“Designers should all take some time and learn programming,” John Anderson declared one day over lunch. “Then they won’t keep proposing such really difficult things.” “But then they wouldn’t come up with great ideas,” Lisa Dusseault replied.

Video Book Review: Ruined by Design by Mike Monteiro (5m)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 09:58:03 -0400

https://www.ruinedby.design

April Book Update

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 09:54:46 -0400

I don’t do many book updates on this blog. In fact I don’t read nearly as much as I would like. I’m a slow reader and in general am more visual, watching videos, movies and games.

I do maintain a reading list profile on Goodreads and welcome friend invites there.

Anyways, I recently finished and started some books that have really impressed me so I wanted to share.

First, I finally finished Permanent Record, by Edward Snowden. It was really good. I related a lot to Ed’s younger experiences with computers and learned a ton about his, um, event. The problems with mass surveillance and the desecration of personal privacy are as important today than ever and this book has fortified me for the fights ahead.

Next I read / browsed through iOS Unit Testing by Example by Jon Reid. I’m a fairly experienced tester so the introduction side of this book was skimmed over pretty quickly but I still picked up a ton of ideas and tricks to keep in mind for future projects. I’m thrilled a resource like this exists. Well technically the book is still in beta, but there is lots there to check out even today.

I’m currently reading three books.

To help me automate and containerize my Elixir project deployments I’m reading Learn Docker in a Month of Lunches by Elton Stoneman. This too is still in beta but all the chapters are currently available. I’m about half way through and have started to apply what I’m learning. I appreciate how the author tries not to assume too much about the reader’s background. DevOps is a deep field and I personal benefit from having, even the basics, explained to me.

Next up is Swift for Good: Volume One by Paul Hudson (and others). I bought this pretty much blind a few months back, mostly to support the cause, but now that I’m reading it I consider it a must read for all iOS developers. I’m about half way through but am picking up MAJOR ideas and am excited to try them out. It reminds me of the The Best Software Writing book published in 2005, which was a repackaging of some of the best blog authors / software developers of the day. If you haven’t checked out Swift for Good yet and are currently doing iOS development, make it a priority.

The third and final book that I just started but have connected with instantly is Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It by Mike Monteiro. I’ve seen Mike speak many times and once again he does not disappoint. I’m a firm believer in coders being responsible for what they build. It all starts with ethics and this book hopefully is helping many search their souls for how they can do good in this world.

If you use Goodreads, consider making a new friend request or posting your own book update. I love discovering what people books are enjoying, even if it takes me a while to finally read them.

Book: The Common Good

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 10:00:00 -0500

I’ve been a long time fan of Robert Reich and particularly enjoyed his documentary Inequality for All from 2013. This year he has a new book, The Common Good – and I liked it a lot.

Robert B. Reich makes a powerful case for the expansion of America’s moral imagination. Rooting his argument in common sense and everyday reality, he demonstrates that a common good constitutes the very essence of any society or nation. Societies, he says, undergo virtuous cycles that reinforce the common good as well as vicious cycles that undermine it, one of which America has been experiencing for the past five decades. This process can and must be reversed. But first we need to weigh the moral obligations of citizenship and carefully consider how we relate to honor, shame, patriotism, truth, and the meaning of leadership.

I like this book because it goes above the here and now issues to ask the bigger question of how our society broke down and then offers some thoughts as to what it will take to fix it.

The book ends with a discussion guide which doubles as a fair outline of what’s in the book. Check it out, and if you want to know more – get the book.

A Discussion Guide for The Common Good

PART I: What Is the Common Good?

How do you define the “common good” in America? What do Americans have in common other than national symbols like the flag and the national anthem? What do these symbols mean to you?
Do Americans have obligations to the nation in addition to paying taxes, serving on juries, and voting? If so, what are they?
Some say Americans are selfish and self-centered. Others point to acts of kindness and courage—first responders to emergencies, everyday acts of altruism. How would you describe our national character?
Has America’s character changed over time—since your parents were children, for example? If so, how and why?
Do you trust government to do the right thing most of the time? Do you believe in our system of government—the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, federalism, and the rule of law?
What’s the difference between a concern for the common good and nationalism?
What role does a president play in setting the moral tone of the nation?

PART II: What Happened to the Common Good?

Why has the public’s trust in all major American institutions—especially government, big businesses, banks, and the media—plunged over the past forty years? What events or trends have been most responsible for the decline?
Americans appear to have become far more partisan than we were forty years ago—liberals have moved to the “left” and conservatives to the “right,” Republicans and Democrats are less willing to compromise, and everyone seems to be angrier. Why has this happened?
Have widening inequalities of income and wealth played a part?
Has the flood of big money into our political system played a part?
Are the two related?
Why before the 1980s did big corporations have responsibilities toward their communities and their workers, in addition to their shareholders? Why after the 1980s did big corporations focus solely on maximizing profits and shareholder returns? Should corporations go back to their former ways?
A major theme in the 2016 presidential election, coming from both major parties, was that the economic system is “rigged” for the benefit of those at the top. Why did this theme appear so prominently in 2016 and not before? Do you agree with it?

PART III: Can the Common Good Be Restored?

What are the attributes of good leadership? Do leaders of business, government, and the media have responsibilities to restore trust in their institutions? If so, how should they go about it?
What roles do honor and shame play in contemporary American society? Ideally, who should be honored and for what, and who should be shamed and for what? How should such honoring and shaming occur?
Who do you trust to inform you about public issues such as climate change, the economy, or dangers posed by foreign governments? What are the qualities or characteristics you look for in deciding whom to trust in conveying the truth?
Does a democracy depend on a shared reality, or can a democracy function with people believing fundamentally different facts?
Are Americans adequately educated about how government and the economy are supposed to work, as well as how they actually work? If not, what should that education consist of, and when should it begin?
Do Americans have sufficient understanding of the obligations of citizenship? If not, who should be responsible for providing this understanding? Parents? Teachers? Public officials?
Do we have an obligation to break out of our self-made “bubbles” of friends, neighbors, and Internet algorithms that confirm everything we believe? If so, how can we do it? If not, can we still be effective participants in our democracy?
How do you think the common good can best be restored?

PragProg Thanksgiving Sale

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 23 Nov 2015 19:08:58 +0000

I started reading books from the Pragmatic Programmers back when I started learning about Rails 1.0 and over the years have built up quite a significant library from them.

They are having their annual Thanksgiving sale, 40% off all ebooks (code “turkeysale2015”). A great time to load up for some holiday reading.

My recommendation this year is The Nature of Software Development. It shares many core values I have about software development. It’s a short read with lots of quirky sketches. I highly recommend it.

There was also a talk at ETE from Ron about the book but I’ll continue to recommend the book itself more as I think it’s a little more focused, better value for your time.

Updated Reading List

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 05 May 2013 20:34:21 +0000

Updated my reading list. Go check it out!

Reading is good for the soul. Thought I’d share my reading list and update it once a month or so. If you have any recommendations shoot me an email or a tweet.

Book Review: The Lean Startup

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 19:16:54 +0000

With the sale of ProfitTrain complete, my schedule has room for a new project. There’s a handful of ideas I’m working through, but, before I jump into one, I think that now is a great opportunity to catch up with some business books I’ve had on my radar.

The Lean Startup, written by Eric Ries, is a book I first received from New Relic through some promotion. Sadly, I wasn’t in much of a reading phase at the time, but with a secondary recommendation the other day, I decided to go ahead and start reading.

First, the book defines an entrepreneur as:

an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Using this definition, Eric explains that you can find entrepreneurs everywhere, from the typical garage startup to a division inside a larger corporation that’s been told to start a new initiative or project.

Some might say that we live in a golden age of entrepreneurship, but, while the overall number of new startups is increasing, success continues to be a real challenge. Lots of startups are failing because of elements that can actually be avoided. The Lean Startup is a movement that challenges entrepreneurs to work less on instinct on more on measurement in order to quickly learn what it takes to build a sustainable business.

Too often product ideas will come to a team and they’ll enter a long development cycle, only to find out that they’ve spent all their money and built something they can’t sell or that nobody wants. The Lean Startup encourages building “Minimum Viable Products” which will help start a real feedback loop with customers as soon as possible. Only by working with real customers can you truly learn.

Learning is an important, if not the most important, aspect for the Lean Startup movement. It should be at the center of how you spend all your time. If you are working on something that is not going to help you learn about customer behavior or evaluate a company risk, it’s probably just waste.

The heartbeat of a Lean Startup is the feedback loop, named “Build-Measure-Learn.” In practice, your actual feedback loop might look something like this:

Figure out what you want to learn about your customers.
Figure out how you’ll measure it.
Build it into the product.
Deploy it to the customers.
Measure customer behavior.
Use these measurements and metrics to define future work and pivots.
Repeat.

The feedback loop should be as small as possible.

When it comes to metrics, Lean Startup does warn against “vanity metrics” — these might be reports or charts that look good at first glance but don’t really represent whether your business is really growing. Consider an app that gets 1,000 downloads per day but also has a bounce rate of 80%. What if that remaining 20% decays over time to leave you with only a handful of active users. Showing a “Total Downloads” chart might make the team feel nice inside, but does this represent the real growth rate of the product? What you need to track will vary per business model, but the recommendation to be wary of “vanity metrics” is true for all.

There is more advice in the book, including some suggestions on using “Five Whys” to help find root causes of problems, along with a reminder than no system is perfect for everyone. That said, I really took a liking to the ideas of Lean Startup. I’m currently reading a nice followup book, Running Lean, which has a collection of real world approaches to applying Lean Startup to a business or product prospect.

Regardless of what my next project may be, I’m definitely interested in applying The Lean Startup to see how it works out.

To learn more, you can check out the book’s website: theleanstartup.com.