Lean Startup

Large companies employ a variety of methods to develop new products, services, and processes that are critical to their future. We typically refer to these as “innovation,” but what we really mean is growth. Continuous and sustainable growth requires repeatable, scalable business models that create long-term competitive advantages. Every large company has a track record for innovation, that’s how they became large in the first place. “Innovation Capital” is the combination of a company’s talent, ideas, and culture, leveraged by their institutional knowledge, and fused with a capacity for rapid data acquisition. When combined with a system of real-time innovation metrics, innovation portfolio management is informed by data, maximizing returns and market position. Launchpad Co-Founder and Executive Chairman Jim Hornthal will discuss the components of Innovation Capital, how to find and share your company's existing assets, and how to create a culture and process that maximizes use of Innovation Capital.

How do you make the culture change from traditional to Lean work? It requires changing behaviors and building new habits and competencies. In this breakout session, Cindy Alvarez will share strategies that Microsoft's Cloud & Enterprise division has employed to help its 8,000+ employees learn new skills, build new habits, and change behaviors. You'll learn the pros and cons of various approaches, what initial investments they required, and which situations they've worked best in. If your leadership is looking to you to recommend a Lean strategy, this session will help you make a recommendation that works best for your organization.

In this participatory, fishbowl-style panel, Lean Design experts discuss how Lean systems allow teams to more quickly iterate upon and scale their ideas. Panelists Courtney Hemphill (Carbon Five), Ken Skistimas (GE Digital), and Amy Neuman (Autodesk) will cover the process, infrastructure, and team configurations inherent to Lean Design. Expect solid takeaways on how to incorporate these practices into your organization, and the chance to ask questions of our panelists. Moderated by Amee Mungo (GoKart Labs).

Bionic CEO David Kidder sits down with Carey Kolaja, the Global Chief Product Officer of Citi Fintech, to discuss how this juggernaut of bank is changing the way it works and building disruptive fintech solutions like a startup. Kidder and Kolaja will delve into not just what Citi Fintech is focused on but how they built a program for growth that combines the Lean Startup methodology with growth boards, which manage the investment and support of new ideas so they aren't prematurely killed or (equally problematic) prematurely scaled.

Groups of attendees crowd the stage after every conference we host, hoping to get a minute with Eric to ask his advice. To help get as many of the questions plaguing your business or organization answered by Eric as possible, we’re hosting a “Office Hours with Eric Ries” in New York. For this 30-minute session moderated by Jason Ashlock, Eric will be available via Skype to answer your questions about applying Lean Startup with your teams. You’ll learn not only how to resolve your internal issues, but also hear more about the challenges your peers in related industries are struggling with too. You’ll be asking your questions via the simple audience interaction app Slido, making for easy upvoting when those really pressing queries roll in.

Partner Webcast: How Enterprise Companies Can Use Product Analytics to Move Fast When: Thursday, August 17 at 9am PT/noon ET Featuring: Justin Bauer, VP of Product at Amplitude Product leaders at enterprise companies face a variety of challenges to moving fast. They come up against issues such as a lack of urgency to learn, decision making formed by opinions instead of metrics, and a lack of accountability to and ownership of metrics. In the current “age of the customer,” making decisions and iterating quickly is critical to staying competitive. Justin Bauer, VP of Product at Amplitude, will discuss how leading product organizations are using product analytics to spur innovation and increase decision velocity. By decentralizing decision-making and using metrics to ensure alignment and accountability across large teams, enterprise companies can use product analytics to empower those closest to customers’ problems. Justin will be interviewed by David Binetti, a Senior Faculty member with Lean Startup Co. Co

In this webcast Jim Cook, the current CFO of Mozilla, discusses his influential experiences running many of the early Netflix experiments. There were challenges every day, and data collection was rigorous. He is interviewed by Lean Startup Co. Corporate Education Program faculty member, Hugh Molotsi. www.leanstartup.co.

Groups of attendees crowd the stage after every conference we host, hoping to get a minute with Eric to ask his advice. To help get as many of the questions plaguing your business or organization answered by Eric as possible, we hosted a “Live Q&A with Eric Ries” in London. For this 30-minute session, moderated by Dave Cunningham, Eric answered your questions via Skype about applying Lean Startup with your teams. He discussed not only how to resolve your internal issues, but also the challenges your peers in related industries are struggling with too.

For many established organizations, the problems are clear: disruption from more nimble startups, waterfall processes that waste time and resources, and a culture that rewards playing by inflexible rules over running customer-driven experiments. The solutions are less obvious. How do organizations launch and scale internal startups? How do you systemize intrapreneurship? How should you change the way you hold employees accountable to encourage continuous innovation? Our Lean Enterprise experts Tendayi Viki and Janet Bumpas have actionable solutions to these questions and many others haunting Lean Enterprise practitioners. In this webcast, which will be moderated by six-time entrepreneur David Binetti, Tendayi and Janet will share case studies and actionable takeaways and answer your burning questions.

In transforming the way they work, GE knew it was time to rethink the performance process. Old performance management systems don’t work in a fast-changing market. The old way restricts them and doesn’t allow for the innovation critical for companies to remain relevant today. Join us in learning how to redefine and rebuild your company’s culture during an interview with Marilyn Gorman, Senior Faculty for Lean Startup Co.’s Education Program, and Janice Semper the Culture Leader for General Electric.The Lean Startup approach goes beyond building products and can be a toolkit used for the entire company, fundamentally changing the way we work and think. Email us: education@leanstartup.CO Follow Lean Startup Co. @leanstartup Heather McGough can be reached on Twitter @UrbanitySF

A Q&A with Product Expert Laura Klein When: Thursday, September 15th at 10am PT / 1pm ET. Featuring: Laura Klein, Principal at Users Know Most companies trying to incorporate Lean Startup into their product development process run into similar issues. There’s the question of where good design, user research, and product management fit into the Build, Measure, Learn loop. There’s the challenge of building something people love while shipping code 50 times a day. How do you build something great today while also planning for what to build tomorrow? And should you focus on user acquisition or making your current users happy? Bring your questions, problems, and frustrations to this webcast with product expert Laura Klein. She’ll help you figure out how to create a user-centered, data-informed product cycle that lets you build, measure, and learn more effectively. Moderated by Phil Dillard, Lean Startup Co. Faculty

In 2010, Farmgirl Flowers’ Christina Stembel quit her gig at Stanford to launch a startup aimed at personalizing the cookie-cutter flower delivery industry. Her locally-sourced, artistically arranged, and totally gorgeous bouquets took off with a customer base craving naturally vibrant flowers. Now Christina is a successful founder who has grown her business from a bike-delivery service in San Francisco to a national destination for on-demand bouquets picked from American farms. Christina is one of two female founders we’ll be chatting with in our next Lean Startup webcast focusing on the specific strategies of next level CEOs. Our other guest on Aug. 31st is Mamie Kanfer Stewart, who is doing the brave work of killing off unproductive meetings through her company Meeteor, which helps organizations use meetings to drive productivity and collaboration rather than being massive time and soul-sucks. The two founders will talk with Lean Startup expert Aubrey Smith about the companies they’re building and the Le

On July 22nd, Eric Ries is joined by Geeta Wilson, director of Consumer Experience at Humana, to discuss Lean Startup in the health and wellness industry. In this webcast, brought to you in partnership with Humana, Eric and Geeta will talk about the issues facing companies in regulatory environments, and the unique position that leaders must take in order to implement lean startup. They’ll discuss the successes (and struggles) that Humana has faced, as well as challenges in the healthcare industry that other companies can learn from, such as: lean startup to empower different parts of the value chain, innovation in a professional environment, bringing new products to market, and more. The discussion is moderated by Phil Dillard, a lean startup expert and trainer. Presented by Humana.

Founder of startup Meeteor shares her pivot story, discusses first hires, talks features, customers, pricing, product cycle, customer feedback, and shares her most important Lean Startup takeaways. Meeteor's web and mobile apps help you spend less time in unproductive meetings and more time moving work forward. http://www.meeteor.com/ Mamie Kanfer Stewart can be reached on Twitter @mamieks Follow Meeteor @meeteorHQ Heather McGough can be reached on Twitter @UrbanitySF Follow Lean Startup Co. @leanstartup

You’ve probably “gotten outside the building” and talked to customers. You’ve identified problems that need solving, and maybe even built a Minimum Viable Product. But how do you tell whether your idea represents a viable business? In this webcast, Ash Maurya, author of Running Lean and creator of the Lean Canvas, shares techniques for ballparking and measuring the output of a working business model using a handful of key metrics. Watch the webcast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHXqMjOQ6Gw

Why is finding Product-Market Fit so overwhelming? Because the tools available today leave us with more questions than answers. In this hands-on, online workshop, Justin won’t give you more theory about why Product-Market Fit is important – he’ll show you how to find it. In this preview of the workshop he’s running during this year’s Lean Startup Week, Justin will shift the way you think about Product-Market Fit from testing an overwhelming set of assumptions, to running an optimized set of just 5 experiments. You’ll leave this workshop knowing: The 5 experiments you need to find Product-Market Fit Which experiment your startup needs to run next How to run that experiment Watch the video webcast here: https://youtu.be/FizgHbhNkDM

Startup Story: Discussing the genesis of Daybreaker and General Assembly with Matt Brimer Back in 2013, Matt Brimer decided to try an experiment. He wanted to find out if people would show up for an early morning dance party in the middle of the week, before work. And they did. 150 people bought tickets to the first event, and the community grew at a rapid pace. Daybreaker now gets 500+ people at each event and has spread to cities around the world. The concept for Daybreaker replicated the genesis of General Assembly, which also began as a social experiment. Brimer and three friends wanted to create a place where people could come together for entrepreneurship, collaboration, and learning. Since its inception in 2011, General Assembly (GA) has turned into a global education company that offers classes and workshops focused on in-demand skills, like technology, design, and business, that helps its students get jobs and entrepreneurs start businesses. In this Lean Startup webcast, we’ll talk to Matt about h

Jeff Gothelf, organizational designer and co-author of the best-selling Lean UX and the forthcoming book Sense and Respond, joined us on for a conversation about leveraging technology to improve customer communication. As consumers come to expect 24/7 responses from businesses, the companies that embrace continuous communication with customers gain a competitive edge. Jeff will discuss his insights on the value of platforms that enable real-time responses. He’ll also explain why management should support cross-functional development between product strategy, development, and design teams. View the webcast here: https://youtu.be/NTnrdMcrEdw

Hear an uncut interview with Garrett Dunham of Singularity University as he's interviewed by Heather McGough of Lean Startup Company. Dunham shares stories from his diverse professional background, talks experimentation, failure, and about what enterprise organizations and startups really need to know about how to work together. Garrett Dunham can be reached on Twitter @GarrettDunham Heather McGough can be reached on Twitter @UrbanitySF Follow Lean Startup Co. @leanstartup

What happens when one of the most renowned startup accelerators in the world infuses Lean Startup methodology? Zach Nies, Managing Director at Techstars Boulder program http://www.techstars.com/programs/boulder-program/, joins Heather McGough of Lean Startup Company to discuss how they're helping entrepreneurs, use Lean Startup thinking to overcome challenges. Zach shares what techniques large organizations can learn from an accelerator and more. Zach Nies can be reached on Twitter @zachnies Heather McGough can be reached on Twitter @UrbanitySF Follow Lean Startup Co. @leanstartup