Lean Startup

Des will cover key areas for product strategy in a startup: defining your mission; defining your product, scoping your product, analyzing usage, and iterating. Useful for startups at almost any stage, this talk will offer advice you can put to use immediately.

People with a deep understanding of profitable engineering workflows often cite Don among the writers who have influenced them most profoundly. He’ll share insights not only for engineers, but for civilians, too, to help you better see the structure of Lean and apply it most effectively.

Cultivating Lean Startup Teams When People Don't Know What It Is (or Are Hostile to It) Often, a Lean Startup implementation has to start as a stealth initiative. Emily has snuck in the techniques in a number of ways, and she’ll describe several that have high success rates, which works best with which kind of internal audience, and where to learn more.

Nicole and Khalid run Lessoncast, which builds software for educators. They’ve taken creative steps with their concierge MVP and will talk about concrete things small startups can do to learn from the concierge process and reach product-market fit with B2B customers.

Kiva by Lean Startup

Risk and uncertainty define startups–they’re the very qualities that make new initiatives different from established projects. But few of us have productive ways of discussing risk, and in fact, bringing it up can cause fear and undermine morale. How can we make coworkers comfortable addressing risk? Adam Josephs, Principal Consultant of Celerity Consulting, shares advice for discussing it early, often and constructively.

When established companies experiment, you have to figure out how to test ideas without harming your existing brand. Andrew Homeyer, Engineer and Intrapreneur at Rally Software, explains how his team launched a new product under a fresh brand and reached an entirely new customer segment.

Higher education has legendarily long decision-making cycles, which create a real tension for teachers and administrators who want to test curriculum ideas in new digital markets. Allison Dulin, Special Projects for the President at Davidson College, explains how the 177-year-old college has shifted its decision-making processes and used experimentation to face down the uncertainty that’s rocking education markets.

As a well-known startup veteran, investor and author, Ben Horowitz brings unusually deep insight to the hard questions that entrepreneurs face. Eric Ries interviews him and gives you a chance to ask questions, too.

Fostering an active local community is easier said than done. It’s hard to gain momentum, and people often say that they want something but then do the exact opposite. Anthony Fraiser, founder of The Phat Startup, teaches the experimentation process and metrics he used to build a vibrant entrepreneurship community in Newark, NJ, from scratch.

Brand-new startups begin with almost zero customer data–a risky position from which to build a new product. But when you have very little money, how can you acquire critical information quickly? Anita Newton advisor, investor, and marketer at Mighty Handle, reveals how her bootstrapped, non-technical startup did clever customer development online, and rapidly tested its way into the customer insights it needed to sell its consumer packaged goods to the largest retailer in the world.

When a team at Google felt uncertain about which pieces of their work drove real value for customers and had an impact on the bottom line, Blair Beverly, a Manager in Google AdSense, suggested they try Lean Startup methods. He explains how he’s working to win over colleagues and management, using a counter-intuitive process to adopt the ideas.

As the founder and CEO of Idealab, Bill Gross has started more than 100 companies, with MVPs of all kinds. This afternoon, he’ll share his best advice for making them successful–and this morning, as an experiment within the conference, he’ll share a preview of that talk from the main stage.

When you run a startup, it’s easy to assume that your small team necessarily works cross-functionally, because you all talk pretty often. But when you’re trying to move quickly, and lots of projects are run by just one person, you can inadvertently skip important collaboration across roles. Cheryl Contee, CEO at Fission Strategy and co-founder of Attentive.ly, talks about how her startups bake in cross-functional collaboration from the beginning, both to improve their products and to lay the groundwork for holistic product development as they grow.

Team leaders from Brant Cooper’s December 9 workshop, Introducing Lean Startup in Your Corporation, share real-time conference experiment results, giving you a chance to see what evidence-based decision making looks like.

How do successful companies grow? Bob Sutton, author of “Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less,” has done deep research in start-ups, pharmaceuticals, airlines, retail, financial services, high-tech, education, non-profits, government, and healthcare, and he’ll talk with Eric Ries about what it takes to scale up quickly and effectively.

Finding product/market fit is the key to success for new ventures. But it’s often elusive, and understanding the needs and desires of your potential customers is harder than many of us expect. Christina Wodtke, of Wodtke Consulting, shares design techniques to help you glean meaningful insights about your target market.

We all hear that we should make “data-driven” decisions in deciding what to test and how to measure results. But few of us have much experience actually doing that. With real and accessible examples, Dan McKinley walks us through the process–and the simple math–he developed to test, or scrap, new ideas at Etsy.

When you have long product cycles or you’re building big physical things–or both–you typically face significant risk, as a lot can go wrong between drawing board and customers. In theory, Lean Startup methods help you reduce that risk. But it’s not always obvious how you can apply them. Cory Nelson, Sr. Executive Product Manager at GE Distributed Power, talks with Eric Ries about how GE has used Lean Startup methods to develop a new diesel engine more quickly and with less risk than it had for similar products in the past.

When you have an untested concept, it’s easy to come up with reasons to avoid customer development or ignore the qualitative feedback you’re getting. Cindy Alvarez, author of Lean Customer Development and head of product design and user research for Yammer (a Microsoft company), leads several entrepreneurs through a live problem-solving session, highlighting actionable approaches to customer development challenges.