The Service Startup

Design Thinking Gets Lean

By: Tenny Pinheiro

Narrated by: James Fouhey

Length: 4 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

This book is a practical guide that explores how startup entrepreneurs and business leaders, who hold no design degrees, can integrate service design into their development cycles to create sustainable, desirable, and profitable new services.

In the first part, Tenny explores the reasons why startups need to move away from the make and sell, industrial logic we've been exploiting over the last century. To take its place, he proposes a new service-oriented mindset that carries the idea of learn, use, and remember users' journeys. He also discusses the challenges our industrial society is facing and how the combination of design with a service-oriented mentality can be key to help new and existent businesses make this shift.

In the second part, he will take you on a journey through the MVS - Minimum Valuable Service - model. This model can seamlessly integrate service design into the Lean startup or any Agile development cycle. It adds the human values needed to foster service innovations within the Lean's scientific approach. In this part of the book, you will learn tools, methods, and practices that will help you get your hands dirty with design.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

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Thought Provoking

The ideas of the author challenged my knowledge of design, but still worth my time.

I love his introduction of MVS - Minimum Viable Service which was well explained too.

Go beyond Lean Startup thinking

This guy is smart enough to realize that Design Thinking didn't really start a few years ago, and goes back a long way. He details the history of design, and how it got relegated to aesthetics.

He acknowledges the value of Lean Startup, but takes us many steps beyond that; into a set of empathic processes that help us develop things in a much more collaborative way. From his viewpoint, the Lean Startup MVP is much too late in the game to start building prototypes! Life is about services, not products. Even products are really services!

I found this book clear, actionable, and applicable as a brilliant addition to Lean Startup/Design Thinking type methods, and also stands on its own. This book should give you some real insights towards a deeper wisdom of how to design products and services that are truly useful, efficiently and wisely.

Interesting read but get the paper/e-book version

The information provided is pretty interesting but the book seems to have a huge amount of lists and tables which makes the storytelling very inconsistent at times and it's easy to lose track of the actual story halfway through a chapter. I am going to get it as an e-book which will be much more suited for the content of the book.

A few rays of light amongst the excess verbiage

I would recommend purchasing the print book or Kindle edition. This will let you skim read the excessive ego justification of part one, deal with the long and not very useful tables, and provide more helpful access to the useful instructions in part two.

The author clearly feels that all forerunners in the fields of design and entrepreneurship got it wrong. They spend the first part of the book justifying their position, and possibly their ego. The narrator did a great job of working through the excess words and pretentious language, particularly in the early chapters. The later part of the book is a mashup of much of the earlier work they disparage, reframed with new names.

There are some gems among this, or you could read The Lean Startup and learn Design Thinking and work much of this out for yourself.