What Is Lean Analytics, and How Do You Apply It?

Lean analytics is a great and innovative method to streamline your sales funnel. Combined with the psychological insight of Nir Eyal, success is almost guaranteed.

As a reader of this blog, you will be familiar with the Lean Startup approach. Lean analytics is an extension of this method. As Benjamin Yoskovitz and Alistair Croll write in their influential book Lean Analytics:

 “Lean Startup helps you structure your progress and identify the riskiest parts of your business, then learn about them quickly so you can adapt. Lean Analytics is used to measure that progress, helping you ask the most important questions and get clear answers quickly.”

More specifically, lean analytics is a great method to streamline your sales funnel. The core idea behind this approach is this: by knowing the kind of business you are and the stage you’re at, you can track and optimize the most important metrics that matter to your business right now.

Yoskovitz and Croll describe in their book 5 lean analytic stages every startup goes through:

1. Empathy

Get to know your customer and what problems he wants to solve. Then you build a product that will solve one or more of these problems.

2. Stickiness

Is your product sticky? Give it to the users and see if they will be engaged.

3. Virality

This stage is about user acquisition, in other words, the onboarding process.

4. Revenue

In this state, you start to think about how to monetize your product.

5. Scale

Finally, it’s time to grow your market!

Just like many other approaches, lean analytics has spawned its own canvas, a comprehensive tool that helps you to apply the method. The talented Scrum expert Nicolas Nemmi created the Lean Roadmap Canvas. By the way, it is based on the Hooked model by Nir Eyal, one of my favorite authors.

Nemmi’s canvas is made up of the following boxes that you have to combine with the 5 lean analytics stages described above:

• Trigger: What gets the user to the product? An example can be an advertisement or a word-of-mouth
• Action: What is the simplest behavior in anticipation of reward? In other words, you have to make the buying process as frictionless as possible. Amazon’s 1-Click Ordering process is a good example that accomplishes this goal.
• Variable reward: Is the reward fulfilling, yet leaves the user wanting more? Netflix and candy manufacturers are great at this!
• Investment: What is “the bit of work” done by the customer to increase the likelihood of returning? For example, the value of social media increases when more contacts are added.

Using this canvas works as follows. Go through the following instructions for each subject:

• Choose a desired outcome for the first .
• Select the dates against which a feasible goal is measured and set that goal.
• Make a list of actions or functionalities that help achieve this goal.
• Test and then implement one functionality at a time and measure how it impacts the data.
• When you have reached your desired goal, you can proceed to the next box.

Need any help with this process? I would be pleased to help you!