A client of mine, who runs a health food granola business, was recently telling me about some of the advice she got when first starting her company 3 years ago.

All of her tech developer friends were telling her to get her granola product in mass production and out to as many customers as possible, so she could get feedback and shape her product around that.

She told me how this advice didn’t resonate with her, and against the suggestions of her peers she held off on releasing anything and continued to take time to focus on making her product better.

In the industry of high end health food you have one shot to win a customer over.

When’s the last time you bought some food brand, did not like it, and then gave it a second chance.

My client intuitively knew this and held out bringing anything to mass market before she felt it was ready.

And despite what her developer friends were telling her, it was absolutely the right call to make.

I am responsible for managing all of the online sales channels for her business, which as of right now consists of our own Ecommerce store and Amazon.

I recently ran the numbers on our customer data and over 1 in 3 of everyone who buys her product becomes a repeat lifetime customer.

Three years after launching the initial product line, few drastic changes have been made to the core product recipes.

By releasing to market an already mature well tested product she has been able to capture a loyal repeat customer base with its outstanding quality.

This is a prime example where worn out lean startup platitudes about shipping MVPs that you don’t think are ready, and then quickly iterating, fall short when applied outside the scope of tech.

Engaging with customer feedback and translating that into improving your product is important for any industry, but to think that it can be done quickly and easily is an incorrect assumption that those in tech make about other industries.

Making alterations to recipes and then implementing them into mass food production isn’t as easy as creating a new feature or bug fix branch.

I go to college and work part-time as a software engineer. I agree that lean startup and agile methodologies have value. It has certainly changed for the better the way I go about writing code, but with enough time good ideas are always in danger of devolving into dogma.

It is true that lean startup and agile methodologies from tech have the potential to change and optimize other industries. The company I work for is in manufacturing and I’ve witnessed this first hand.

However, instead of just assuming the way an industry operates is naive or old fashioned we should first seek to understand why the people in that space operate the way they do. Is there some wisdom in it that you’re not seeing?

And we can’t assume that because something works well for software it is a universal truth that can be applied everywhere else.