In the lean startup, product and management team build quickly, then iterate based on statistics gathered from real users (that’s Eric Ries’s excellent description below). When Seth Godin gripes about lack of vim in the nonprofit sector, this is the approach he’s missing.

Why does it seem so rare in the social sector?

In parallel to this work by the “solution team” (engineering, ops and QA) there is a new kind of “problem team” (what we used to call business development, marketing, and sales) that is asking the bigger questions, such as: Who will our customers be? What problem does our product solve for them? How many of them are there? And how will we reach them?

– via gigaom.com