Ben Horowitz says that Lean is not an end within itself, that winning the market is the only end. He also said in a PandoMonthly interview that the best product doesn't always win the market, but that whoever wins the market will end up with the best product.

What do you think?

Actually, he says that "lean" is not an end - with lean meaning cheap. As far as I can tell, this has nothing to do with Lean as a methodology.

@Laura->you're right, his argument is a bit of a straw man. Maybe he genuinely didn't grok Lean at this time. Either way, do you believe Lean is an end?

I think that serving the customer sustainably is the end. Lean methods are a means to that. As, possibly, is getting market share.

But if I were going to pick something to focus on, it'd be Lean. There are plenty of companies with large market share that serve nobody but themselves. E.g., cigarette makers.

I agree with William that Lean itself is not an end. The results are what matter. Lean is a tool that may help you get those results. You don't learn to use a hammer for the joy of hammering. You learn to use a hammer because you want to connect a couple of pieces of wood together.

It's not like you somehow get extra points for doing it one way instead of another. I personally think that Lean methodologies make finding product market fit more likely, but if you happen to find it another way, more power to you.

@Laura- interesting point, but how do you explain that almost every major success (even if unconsciously) employed Lean methods? ie. Twitter pivoted from Odeo and started with a very minimally viable product. Dropbox's first MVP was a video posted on Reddit.

@Trevor - Seriously? Almost every major success? I think that's unlikely unless you're defining Lean methods extremely broadly. For example, do you count all the companies that did "customer development" as being Lean? Because that was part of UCD long before it was part of Lean UX.

But even if I concede that lots of successful companies used some piece of Lean, it still doesn't mean that other companies should become Lean as an END. If Lean methodologies don't help you get where you're going, why would you use them?

It's like saying that most successful products get transported by train, so if you're making a product, you should transport it by train, even if the train doesn't go anywhere near where you want your product to go.

@Laura- I'm defining it fairly broadly, in the sense of using Pivots and MVPs. Which may be the essence of what is an end about Lean. It would be really hard to ignore MVP and Pivoting and be successful.

Can you think of good counter-examples to products that you would call un-lean? Or do you just mean that in the future, we're likely to discover a completely new paradigm in building products?

@Trevor - Amazon. Never really pivoted. Came out of the gate with a fully formed solution for selling books. Yes, they've added a ton of things since then, but I still don't think you can call starting with books an MVP. They didn't do that for learning purposes. They did it to bring book selling online. Also, Netflix. Still doing basically what they started. Added streaming when it became a thing.

This is my point about being overly broad in your definition. Any successful company that's been around for several years is going broaden their offerings. It doesn't mean that they started with an MVP. Just that successful companies diversify. I'm sure they did things that we would now identify as lean, but they weren't necessarily "Lean".