Lean Startup

When you’re tackling a hard problem, the solution rarely comes from what you do initially. Rather, it emerges from what you do continuously–provided you set up systems to learn as you go. Max Ventilla, founder at AltSchool, explains how his organization is staying very close to its customers as its key mechanism for scaling up a large network of independent schools.

What can any startup learn from mission-driven companies? From focus, to metrics, to impact, to team, the lessons are deeper than most of us expect. In this conversation, Mitch Kapor, of Kapor Capital, talks with Christie George, Executive Director of New Media Ventures, about building a profitable company that solves real-world problems.

When you’re moving fast to build and grow a new company or project, you’re bound to make mistakes as well as unexpected discoveries. Mikkel Svane, CEO & founder of Zendesk and author of Startupland, shares real stories from the front lines of starting Zendesk that explore how you stay in touch with the human side of customers and your business as you scale.

Opening Remarks: The Lean Startup Conference | Sarah Milstein & Eric Ries by Lean Startup

Key Staff HD | Sarah Milstein & Eric Ries by Lean Startup

The State Of The Lean Startup | Eric Ries by Lean Startup

As an entrepreneur, you’ve probably found lawyers to be more a barrier to innovation than a boon. But by actively reframing their role, you can transform the legal function into an asset rather than a liability. Sean Butler, Senior Corporate Counsel at Cisco, explains how.

The build-measure-learn loop is often accompanied by the frustration-confusion-failure cycle. In other words, implementing Lean Startup methods is hard–particularly when your experiments invalidate a lot of your ideas. In this talk, Seppo Helava, founder at Nonsense Industry, teaches us how he’s led his team to overcome perfectionism and become more comfortable with grey areas and failure.

After doing customer development, you’ve learned that your target market absolutely loves your new product idea. But will they buy it? Steli Efti, founder at Close.io, explains how to get an answer without turning off your interviewees

Mobile development presents particular challenges for experimentation. With competing operating systems and app stores to contend with, how can you move rapidly? Sheena Allen of Sheena Allen Apps walks us through the framework she used for launching–and learning from–six mobile apps on various platforms.

It’s one thing to decide that you’ll rigorously test product ideas, and it’s entirely another matter to actually kill something that isn’t clearly a dud. AppFolio faced this dilemma when deciding whether to launch a new product last year. Product Manager Ursula Shekefundeh takes us through the surprising–and hard–decisions her team made at the persevere/pivot/kill crossroads.

The US federal government is the country’s largest employer and does not have a reputation for moving quickly. But Todd Park, who served from 2012 to 2014 as United States Chief Technology Officer and Assistant to the President and is now a technology advisor to the administration in Silicon Valley, is bringing an entrepreneurial approach to government and continues to make real change. He and key U.S. technology leaders describe their most challenging projects and share advice for experimenting in large organizations.

Telefonica, a Spanish broadband and telecommunications provider with operations in Europe, North America and South America, is one of the largest mobile network providers in the world. What happened when the employees wanted to experiment with a new handset idea? Susana Jurado and Mario Olano, Innovation Managers at the company, have a detailed and instructive story to tell.

When you interview customers, you don’t know what you don’t know–and you don’t know what questions you should be asking but aren’t. Zac Cohn, founder at Wonful, runs an exercise to teach you how to ask the right questions and uncover exactly what you need.

A lot of distributed companies use Lean Startup techniques for product development. But it’s challenging to successfully run customer development and cross-functional experiments with remote colleagues. William Donnell, lead design and UX specialist at Sodium Halogen, teaches creative techniques for very effective Lean Startup approaches on a virtual team.

Create A Culture Of Experimentation | Manuel Rosso by Lean Startup

What Should You Really Measure? Featuring: Alistair Croll, Danielle Morrill, and Eric Ries Who It's For: Standalone startups; corporate innovators; non-profit, government and education leaders When you're developing a new product, or if you work in a mission-driven organization, measuring profit isn't usually an appropriate way to gauge success. Instead, you need innovation accounting or learning milestones to figure out whether your product is gaining traction. But what should you actually measure? In this advanced discussion, we'll debate the idea that there's just one metric that matters for any given kind of product. You'll come away with fresh ways to approach measurement.

Lean Startup 101 Featuring: Janice Fraser and Sarah Milstein Who It's For: Standalone startups; corporate innovators; non-profit, government and education leaders We'll explain the important concepts of Lean Startup, demystify the jargon and supply examples to help you understand what Lean Startup is good for and when you can use it. You'll come away with an understanding of the method and what frequently-used terms like MVP, pivot and innovation accounting are really about.

Lean Startup ideas are increasingly being applied by mission-driven and non-profit organizations. Leaders of these initiatives often find themselves at odds with funders, who use a traditional framework for assessing a project’s merits. Christie will look at funding innovations in the sector–some of which are likely to have implications for the for-profit world, too.

Matt is the founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress, which powers approximately 20% of the web’s biggest sites. His team experiments constantly, yet they nearly all work from home. How do they do it? Sarah Milstein will interview Matt.