The Lean Startup is Dead
The way we build products is being flipped on its head
The Lean Startup was born from the cloud wave
The last major technology shift that fundamentally changed how products were developed was the cloud. This lead to the widespread adoption of Agile and Lean Startup methodologies. These methods were built upon the assumption (which was true at the time) that writing code was the bottleneck for software development. Software engineers were expensive, and no company wanted to waste their resources building the wrong thing.
As a result, significant emphasis was placed on validating, defining, and refining product requirements before writing any code. Organizations grew entire functions dedicated to researching, designing, and validating concepts prior to development. This was a huge improvement from the traditional waterfall style development process and led to the success of tens of thousands of new products.
We’re in the middle of the next technology shift
Generative AI is revolutionizing how code is written. In just the past 6 months, coding assistant tools like Cursor, Windsurf, Lovable, Bolt, and Replit have evolved from being cute ways to help with 10-20% of code to now generating the majority of code for many startups. 1 in 4 companies in the latest YC batch have 95% of their code written by AI. This shift is due to advancements in the capabilities of core models, most notably Claude Sonnet 3.5 and 3.7, explicitly optimized for coding. These models will only continue to improve as we scale training, optimize them more for code, and enhance their "chain of thought" capabilities during runtime.
It’s hard to understate how impactful this will be for the entire world. It’s already unlocked vibe coding, caused major tech companies to stop hiring engineers, and allowed dozens of 1 person teams to get millions in revenue.
A major implication of this shift is that writing code is no longer the bottleneck for building a product. In fact, it’s headed towards becoming one of the easiest parts of product development.
What does this mean? The knock off effects are hard to understate for teams that build software products. All of the assumptions about how to build products need to be revisited.
Let’s say a product team is building a CRM, and they want to add a new analytics feature. Traditionally, teams spent weeks or even months conducting customer research, designing mockups, and gathering user feedback to refine the feature before engineers started writing any code.
In the new world, that process is flipped on its head. Especially if you’re a small startup with a simple codebase, its faster to simply build a basic version of the feature, ship it, and get immediate user feedback. Even if you are an enterprise with a giant codebase, you can quickly ship a clickable prototype of a feature faster than it would take you to design it.
You can skip those weeks or months of research and mockups completely while validating your features faster.
The new product development lifecycle
This new way to build products is much faster and simpler than before, it involves just 4 steps.
Prioritize features by impact
Ship simple version or clickable prototype
Test at scale with users, measure impact
Iterate or kill
This change may not seem that dramatic, but it results in an entirely different product development team.
The new product development team
That’s a reduction from roughly 6 different roles (PM, PMM, Design, Engineering, Research, Data) to just 3 (PMM, Engineering, Data). Less roles means less coordination and a more effective team.
This new team will also prioritize a very different set of tools. QA, A/B testing, and analytics tools will become more valuable than ever. User research and static design tools will become irrelevant.
The new bottleneck
So if the primary bottleneck isn’t writing code anymore, then what is it?
User attention.
There will be proliferation of products in every category, so the only thing that matters will be attention. The companies that learn to build an amazing marketing engine around every new feature and product they build will win. These new product development teams will be smaller, faster, more data-driven, and will help build a set of products that users love.
I’m personally extremely excited to see a proliferation of new, cheaper products. I’ll be writing more about the implications of the 100x decrease in writing code, would love to hear what you think.
> As a result, significant emphasis was placed on validating, defining, and refining product requirements before writing any code. Organizations grew entire functions dedicated to researching, designing, and validating concepts prior to development.
What? This is the exact opposite of the lean startup approach, which is about validating ideas quickly by building prototypes. It seems like you’re describing waterfall.
Everyone’s saying Lean is dead: too slow for AI, too analog.
It's a very thought provoking post and I've been exploring this on my own for a while. I arrived at a different conclusion, Ill try to break it down below:
The main argument behind "Lean is dead" is that if AI can simulate users, generate code, why test, iterate, or validate?
Here's what I think: at its core, Lean is a mindset: build less until you know more +
+ test your riskiest assumptions early + let users (not egos) shape the product.
That doesn’t go away with AI.
If anything, AI makes true Lean faster.
Yes, the cost of building is nearly zero, but the cost of building the wrong thing is similar, and the mindset is still relevant too.
And “nearly zero” applies more to prototypes than production-grade, scalable, secure, ethical products.