Eric Ries asks this one-two punch of all the startup teams he meets with. To the first question, without fail everyone says yes. To the second question, that’s where the rationalizing starts. Ries cautions against making up a story that links recent product changes to cherry-picked positive metrics. (“Well, more people added themselves to our mailing list this month. Probably that means the new homepage pictures are working.”) Instead, he makes the case for “innovation accounting” which you can read all about in Chpt 7 of The Lean Startup.

Source: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

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