Lean Startup Week 2017

The Lean Startup community is LARGE and thriving! Last week I had an opportunity to present at Lean Startup Week 2017. I spoke on a panel of Lean Startup Co. faculty members, and co-presented a two hour workshop with author (and delightful Lean Startup expert) Dan Olsen. Our talk reviewed how to systematically hunt for product-market fit, and zoomed in on the types of experiments you can run to ensure you’re on the right track. I’ll post a link to the slides as soon as they’re live on the Lean Startup Co. slideshare account.

My most compelling takeaways from the conference came from Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, when he talked in-depth about his new book: The Startup Way. For me he addressed one critical question: how do you get the mechanisms of a company to support execution of Lean Startup principles? The material is relevant to companies of almost any size, but is especially pertinent for large companies.

Please contact me if you’d like to discuss Lean Startup Week in depth.

Snapshot from my workshop with Dan Olsen

Chatting with fellow Lean Startup Co. faculty member Marilyn Gorman

Lean + Agile DC 2017

I was recently invited to speak at the Lean + Agile DC conference on the topic of how you can practice Lean Startup even without writing a single line of code. The belief that you need to have dev resources to practice Lean Startup was of course the first myth that we needed to address in our talk ; )

I’ve included the talk below, and am open to discussing the opportunity to present this material to your teams.

It’s easy

People often make the mistake of assuming certain tasks should be a snap, “low hanging fruit”. Anyone can make that assessment, but have you done the job before?

My recommendations:
1) Try doing the task before you assess difficulty and delivery timeframe. 37 signals does this for every hire.
2) Trust your colleagues to make the assessment and deliver
3) If you don’t trust your colleagues, replace with colleagues you trust

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