from the lean to leaner startup

As Ash Maurya highlighted when I interviewed him:

If we go back to, let’s say, the last hundred years or so, that’s when we were in that manufacturing era, and the unfair advantage all companies were all about mass production.

He continued:

The companies that produced the most amount of products for the lowest costs tended to win. It was all about efficiency. After the war, a number of companies started to get squeezed, and this is where Taiichi Ohno over at Toyota invented the Toyota Production System, which kind of spawned this new way of thinking.

The Toyota Production System (TPS) is an early form of lean manufacturing created by auto-manufacturer Toyota.

Created by the Toyota Motor Corporation in the 1940s and 50s, the Toyota Production System seeks to manufacture vehicles ordered by customers as quickly and efficiently as possible.

As Ash Maurya further explained:

Taking a lot of Just in Time techniques and bringing in what became eventually Lean Manufacturing. That’s kind of the origin that we trace back a lot of even what we talk about today in the startup world.

Some of those core principles go back to this idea of being less wasteful, and continuous improvement. Now it has morphed over the years, so as the world has changed,as we have moved from that manufacturing era to more digital products, the need for speed became ever more important.

As we got into PC computing, requirements began to change faster and faster, and so methodologies and frameworks evolved.We moved from traditional manufacturing to waterfall.