Lean Startup

You know that gathering customer feedback is critical to building a successful product or service. But how do you find potential customers to interview? And how do you ensure that your limited time with them will lead to meaningful insights that help you reach product/market fit? Intercom founder Des Traynor explains how to find the right customers, ask the right questions, and avoid common mistakes.

What’s the biggest challenge in getting a team of people to adopt Lean Startup methods? Dan Milstein, founder at Hut 8 Labs, suggests a somewhat surprising answer: it’s the tendency of leaders to fall prey to the deep, built-in human propensity for self-deception. We’re wired to lie to ourselves in certain situations–and, in startups, those situations crop up all the time. Tying together psychology research and his own (painful) experiences on both sides of the leader/team member divide, Dan looks at the dangers of self-deception and what you can do to overcome it.

It’s deceptively easy to test the wrong aspect of your business, wasting time and money while you head down the wrong path. Rather than test the wrong hypotheses or an inappropriate risk for your stage of product development, learn from Grace Ng, co-founder at QuickMVP, as she lays out road-tested tactics for truly effective experiment design.

When you’re building a new product, you have to experiment quickly and change constantly. If your product is digital, and you have a technical infrastructure that isn’t built to deal with these conditions, it can stonewall any kind of innovation. In this talk for technical team members, Codeship co-founder Florian Motlik introduces different ways to build your infrastructure and processes for constant change, experimentation and innovation.

In 2012, social-impact consultant Ellynita Lamin launched a recovery program in a war-torn, economically depressed area of Indonesia. Early in the project, she realized that her own biases were preventing her from measuring progress accurately. She explains the steps she took to truly understand the community’s needs and focus on the right metrics.

Experimentation can generate important insights, but it can also bury you under an avalanche of irrelevant data. Hiten Shah, founder at KISSmetrics, shares key tips and plenty of real-world examples for structuring A/B tests to ensure that you derive useful data every single time you run them.

Your team is committed to customer development and conducting user research, but how do you integrate the information you collect into your product development? Hudl Product Manager Greg Nelson explains how his company ensures that the entire, cross-functional product team understands and can act on customers’ needs.

Every business leader knows that, in theory, good ideas can–and should–come from anywhere in your organization. But in reality, the voices of introverts and people far-removed from decision makers often go unheard. Hugh Molotsi, Vice President of the Intuit Labs Incubator and self-proclaimed introvert, talks about how Lean Startup methods at Intuit have helped surface game-changing ideas from quiet employees, front-line staff and unexpected corners of the organization.

You understand the importance of engaging directly with your customers as you develop products for them. But what happens when your user base is very far away? User experience consultant Holly DeWolf shares practical, cost-effective techniques for overcoming distance challenges and engaging with lots of customers remotely.

More than you know, your software’s business model and technology stack shape your appetite for risk, creativity and pace. Jocelyn Goldfein, former Engineering Director at Facebook, explains the constraints you face with various kinds of product DNA–and how you can embrace those constraints to build valuable software.

In heavily regulated industries, compliance is non-negotiable, and for many product teams, governance can be a deterrent for launching experiments. Is it possible to balance innovation with compliance? Joanne Molesky, principal consultant at ThoughtWorks, answers this question with key lessons learned from her experience in the IT industry.

Leaders often focus on becoming better communicators and speakers. But becoming better listeners may be more important in running profitable companies. In this talk, Jana Eggers–consultant, former CEO at Spreadshirt, and former General Manager of Intuit Quickbase–teaches actionable tips for becoming a better listener and and thus ensuring that your customer development thus has a much deeper impact.

Hardware companies face particular challenges testing and iterating on their product ideas. It’s often cost-prohibitive to get an MVP in the hands of customers, and it can be seemingly impossible to ramp up production cycles. But you can push the boundaries of convention. Kevin Ellsworth, Product Manager at Cirris, explains how his team has built systems for consistent learning that have helped them release new products over a matter of months rather than years.

It’s no secret that product leaders in big companies who need to test new ideas quickly are often stuck with slow release cycles and rigid team processes. How can you overcome the legacy approach? Kathryn Kuhn discusses the calculated tradeoffs her Hewlett-Packard innovation team made in order to speed up its product development cycle, bringing a complex product to market in a matter of months.

Top product managers must have great customer empathy–but too much of it can slow you down. On the one hand, you need empathy to understand your customers, so that you can build products that solve their problems. On the other hand, too much empathy can prevent you from releasing a product that doesn’t solve all of your customers’ needs at once. Lauren Gilchrist, Product Manager at Pivotal Labs, gives five tips for shipping less-than-perfect MVPs so that you can all learn from end users, fast.

MVPs are great–unless you’re building them to test assumptions that aren’t really mission-critical. In this hands-on session, Laura Klein, author of UX for Lean Startups and head of product development for Hint Health, breaks down the kinds of assumptions you should look for and a process for developing hypotheses that reveal your true barriers to growth.

What would happen if your organization funded every single new product idea from any employee, no questions asked? This past year, Adobe did exactly that. Mark Randall, Chief Strategist, VP of Creativity, shares surprising lessons and tangible results from Adobe’s new Kickbox process–including details about how experimentation has transformed good staff into great innovators.

When you’re building a new product, your own domain expertise can–surprisingly–prevent you from recognizing your potential customers’ needs. Margo Wright, founder of Yenko, shares the customer-development approach she’s used to overcome the blinders of her expertise.

What happens when your team uses Lean Startup methods, but other people in your organization don’t? Manuel Rosso, VP of Commerce at Scripps Networks Interactive, explains how his team taught coworkers to value experimentation over expertise.

Vox.com has been one of the most closely watched media launches of the year–and it took the team just nine weeks to develop the high-profile site. As its Senior Product Manager and Executive Editor, Melissa Bell has been responsible for leading a lot of Vox.com’s success. Sarah Milstein interviews Melissa to learn how the company has moved unusually quickly and how it continues to experiment on a scrutinzed site.