About Running Lean Mastery

I’ve been obsessed with finding better and faster ways for building successful products for over a decade. My learnings and tinkering have led to several popular tools (Lean Canvas, Traction Roadmap, and Customer Forces) and two best-selling books (Running Lean and Scaling Lean) used by over a million people.

The origin story for all my work starts here - typically as a raw idea that iteratively takes shape across multiple articles, talks, workshops, and if all checks out, a product.

You’ll get one post delivered to your inbox every week.

Paid subscribers get access to the full archive, a business model design masterclass, and an invitation to a private community.

Most Popular Running Lean Mastery Articles

How to Formulate Your Unfair Advantage Strategy

Ash Maurya

·

Jul 1

Communicating defensibility against copycats and competition is critical when pitching your business model to investors and key stakeholders. This is the job of the Unfair Advantage box on the Lean Canvas — and it’s one of the most challenging boxes to fill, especially at the outset of an idea.

Read full story

Moving beyond MVP

Ash Maurya

·

May 26

After 14 years, I'm abandoning the MVP. Because definitions matter. While the original definition was clearly laid out by Frank Robinson (it is an acronym, after all), then popularized by Eric Ries... over time, it's been misconstrued to mean many things.

Read full story

Forget Personas

Ash Maurya

·

May 19

If you were a marketer at a mattress company, when is the best time to run an infomercial? How about at 2am in the morning when people can’t sleep! You don’t need a persona with dozens of attributes, just a single (causal) attribute that raises the odds of someone buying.

Read full story

Posting schedule

Subscribers receive a new article every Saturday morning (Central time).

Paid subscribers additionally get access to my Business Model Design masterclass (with tools like Lean Canvas and Traction Roadmap), and a private community of like-minded founders. All for $150 per year.