The Service Startup

Design Thinking gets Lean

Tenny Pinheiro, Joel Stein, Lucas Toledo | 3.85 | 131 ratings and reviews

A practical guide to integrate Service Design Thinking and Lean Startup in the service era.

"Pinheiro will inspire you to think differently about business, design, education, and - perhaps most importantly - the way you work every day."
- Kerry Bodine, co-author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business

"In this book, Tenny offers some extremely valid and hard-hitting criticism regarding the ideals surrounding the dictate of building a Minimum Viable Product. Agreed on many fronts but I found his reinvention of these principles when applied to the service industry to be extremely insightful. The concept of a Minimum Valuable Service is unique, new and sets goals intended to deliver maximum value with measurable results. This is a must read for anyone in the global innovation economy."
- Rick Rasmussen, NestGSV. International Business development.

This book is a practical guide that explores how startup entrepreneurs and business leaders, who hold no Design degrees, can integrate Service Design into their development cycles in order to create sustainable, desirable and profitable new services.
In the first part, Tenny explores the reasons why startups need to move away from the "make and sell" industrial logic we've been exploiting over the last century. To take its place he proposes a new service oriented mindset that carries the idea of "learn, use and remember" users' journeys. He also discusses the challenges our industrial society is facing and how the combination of design with a service oriented mentality can be key to help new and existent businesses make this shift.
In the second part, he will take you on a journey through the MVS - Minimum Valuable Service - model. This model can seamlessly integrate Service Design into the Lean Startup or any Agile development cycle. It adds the human values needed to foster service innovations within the Lean's scientific approach. In this part of the book you will learn tools, methods and practices that will help you get your hands dirty with design.

At some point every adventure requires a great guide, and this journey into the heart of the new is led impeccably by Tenny Pinheiro. Slyly sidestepping the pitfalls of the Lean Startup approach, he skillfully navigates us through to a deeper understanding of the forces shaping the evolving service economy. By trusting the wisdom of the many to help design the next phase of business, his approach taps into an inexhaustible source of creativity and innovation. The Service Startup is a trusty roadmap that you will long keep by your side. As Tenny might suggest: learn it, use it, and remember it.
- Jamer Hunt, Parsons The New School for Design. Director for the graduate Program in Transdisciplinary Design.

"I'll admit it: I enjoy seeing someone who knows their stuff re-assemble and improve on the work of an adjacent profession. Tenny calls out what's lacking in the Lean Startup approach, in the most thorough and insightful ways. In the spirit of iteration, he's taken an existing approach and improved on it. If only all criticism were this good. I enjoyed his delightfully nuanced views on the world of services - how they're perceived, experienced, and remembered - as well as his historical perspectives on the worlds of design, business and marketing. Opinionated but also well-informed, this is a pragmatic, human-centric take on designing and delivering services that I'd recommend to anyone whose work affects other people.
- Chad Thornton, Experience Designer, Airbnb" less

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