The Lean Startup (Eric Ries) / quote 15 of 19
If you cannot fail, you cannot learn
These are some of the questions teams struggle to answer if they have followed the “let’s just ship a product and see what happens” plan. I call this the “just do it” school of entrepreneurship after Nike’s famous slogan.1 Unfortunately, if the plan is to see what happens, a team is guaranteed to succeed—at seeing what happens—but won’t necessarily gain validated learning. This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.