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I received two fantastic pieces of news this week: Lean Media is a finalist in both the IBPA Ben Franklin Awards and Foreword Reviews INDIES competition. The IBPA and Foreword Reviews award programs are established, respected competitions that highlight the some of the best fiction and nonfiction works by independent publishers every year. There areRead more

If you follow news about tech startups, you have undoubtedly heard the term “pivot.” It’s a hot idea in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs, and is closely associated with the Lean Startup movement. In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries defines a pivot as a “fundamental change to [a startup’s] business strategy” borne out ofRead more

As I have noted many times on this blog, I actively solicit feedback from potential readers about chapters, diagrams, examples, and other elements of the book. Feedback helps me understand my audience, identify elements that are working well, and also head off potential problems. It’s Lean Media in action. This week, I am soliciting feedbackRead more

When I first started to devise the Lean Media framework for media production, I expected to encounter others working on similar methodologies. So far, though, I have yet to find any structured frameworks that are expressly about making media. That’s not to say that media people don’t think about what we do. We in theRead more

Regardless of whether they use Lean Media methods or not, media pros frequently rely upon surrogate audiences to understand the market for new media. Surrogate audiences are groups of people who like media that’s similar to what you are working on. Let’s say you are producing a new TV show, Rodent World, which explores theRead more

The following post is excerpted from my draft manuscript about Lean Media. Please leave comments below to help me improve the draft! Looking at the Lean Media flowchart, some creators may be aghast at the use of “prototype” to describe early or incomplete versions of a work in progress: The concern is understandable. The termRead more

In my July update, I mentioned the development of the three principles of Lean Media, which came out of my work on the Lean Media book as well as my spring presentation to a small audience that included media people. In this post, I will describe the 3 principles of Lean Media in more detail, and present a diagramRead more

So I am working on a new chapter for my Lean Media book that covers the Lean Media flowchart (see an early version of the flowchart here). Conceptually I thought I was pretty clear on what the different stages entailed. A prototype was a rough or incomplete version of the media being developed. By the timeRead more

A vital element of the Lean Startup framework is the minimum viable product (MVP). This is an early version of the product to show a small set of users. It is not necessary to have a perfect product, nor should the team show the MVP to mainstream customers. Rather, the idea is to quickly getRead more

I have been relatively quiet on the Lean Media website. Behind the scenes, however, I have been making progress with the Lean Media book. There are a few major updates to share, but I also want to reassure readers that the project is continuing and I expect to have more materials to post (including new draft chapters) inRead more