#productdevelopment I'm reading [The Lean Startup Playbook](https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Product-Playbook-Innovate-Products/dp/1118960874) right now and I'm sorely disappointed. I probably shouldn't be, because it follows the tact of so many other "action oriented" books, but I had high hopes for this one. I'm disappointed because while it gives great processes for what you _can_ do to implement the Lean Startup strategies, it provides very little information about _when_ to apply those processes. Just like a football playbook, if you don't know when to run a hail marry vs. a dive play, you're going to lose a lot. The hail mary is great when you're down on your luck and need big yardage right now to get back in the game; the dive is great when you need 1-3 yards. Using the wrong play at the wrong time will result in utter failure of accomplishing your larger goal -- winning the game -- even if your execution of the play is perfect. The Lean Startup Playbook totally skips out on these _whens_. While reading the book, I have no idea when to apply each of the strategies it discusses. Maybe the author will get to this in a later chapter, but I doubt it and I don't want to go digging through the book to find out how to identify which process is the right tool for the job. This is not uncommon. Almost every general life advice blog or book does this; they'll tell you "do this!" and "do that!" but won't explain the situations when it is and isn't appropriate. And so we're left with a ton of things we _should_ do to be successful but it's overwhelming and impossible to do them all. Those blogs and books lack the conditionals: they don't tell us when to apply their strategies and processes in order to be effective. And to be fair, it is really hard to identify the situations in which your processes are and are not effective. Not only does it take a ton of experience to understand when they are effective, it also takes a ton of work to describe what those situations are. And to pile on more difficulties, the effectiveness of every process lies on a spectrum from 0% to 100% -- it's not a simple "this process is effective for that situation" vs. "this process is *not* effective for that situation". Every process will be somewhat effective for all situations, but the threshold of acceptable effectiveness is different for every situation. Maybe that last paragraph was a lot of mumbo jumbo, but the point is that while it's hard to describe when a process is or is not effective, it is crucial to *try* to explain it to your audience. Without knowing when to do things and when not to, we're left with a list of things we _could do. And that's just not very helpful. In order to provide truly actionable advice, we need to know both the process to apply and the conditions under which to apply it.