Lessons Learned

How to Get Free Speaker Training with Kathy Sierra

2013-05-07T11:55:00.000-07:00

This post was written by Sarah Milstein, co-host of The Lean Startup Conference.

We are downright thrilled to announce that Kathy Sierra, one of our all-time favorite speakers and teachers, has offered to provide free training for Lean Startup Conference speakers. If you've never spoken at a conference before, or it you've done it and found you weren't quite the MLK you had imagined, this is a terrific opportunity to build your skills. Company leaders: if you have no budget for speaker training, but you've got employees with amazing expertise and limited presentation chops, please encourage them to apply.

As more companies in more sectors use Lean Startup techniques around the world, there are a burgeoning number of useful lessons out there--but fewer chances we'll know about them. So we're actively seeking stories we don't know to share with our community, and we're interested in people who are not already on the speaking circuit. (In this post, we do a d eep dive on our audi ence, the kinds of talks they find useful, and past talks that peop le loved. Hint: our best talks give advice; if you have some, consider applying.)

Because we're looking for fresh speakers, and because we want to make sure all of our speakers are great communicators, we know we'll have to provide some speaker training. I've taught classes on speaking, and I had been planning to do it. But when Kathy saw that we were offering training, she volunteered enthusiastically, sending an outline for how she'd teach a distributed group, covering both stage fright and presentation skills. Why have the local tennis pro do the coaching when Serena Williams wants to jump in?

If you're not familiar with Kathy's talks, take a look. You may also know of her through the Head First book series, which has a winning pedagogical approach based on brain science that Kathy and her partner Bert Bates researched extensively. In other words, Kathy's got game as a speaker and as a teacher, and her methods are rooted in a deep understanding of how people work. Of note: Kathy wants to do this training on a volunteer basis, because it will be rewarding for her--which tells you something about the kind of teacher she is.

In order to give more people a chance to apply as speakers, we've extended the deadline by a week. It was originally this Thurs, May 9. It is now Thurs, May 16. If you're thinking of applying, do take the time to read our post about what we look fo r in talks, and do follow all of the instructions on our very short application form. And again, if you work with somebody who has useful advice to share and might do it eloquently with a little support, please pass along this post.

Finally, note that w e aim to run a merit-based speaker -selection process. In our experience, that means we wind up with a higher percentage of speakers who are women and people of color than your average entrepreneurship conference. So if you're in a group that's typically under-represented on stage, do know that we've had success in the past bringing in a range of great speaker s--and we intend to build on what's worked.

How to Get Picked as a Speaker for The Lean Startup Conference

2013-04-29T11:10:00.000-07:00

This post was written by Sarah Milstein, co-host of The Lean Startup Conference.

We’re looking for speakers for the 2013 Lean Startup Conference. Last week, we announced that our short application form was live. Today, we’re following up with answers to frequently asked questions we’ve received since then, because the answers will help your application succeed. If you’re a Lean Startup veteran, feel free to skim the beginning, as this is mostly stuff you already know.

1) Can you tell me more about your audience? The Lean Startup Conference is an event by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs—except that our definition of “entrepreneur” may be different from the one you have in mind.

Eric has talked often about recognizing a startup as an organization designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Most commonly, that’s uncertainty about whether you can build the product at all (what MBAs call “technical risk”) or whether anybody will use or buy it (“market risk”). Although every organization faces some uncertainty in developing new stuff, the conditions are not always extreme. For example, when your company adds another blade to its disposable razors, the product’s technical development, marketing and sales will follow relatively predictable paths.

But that’s not to say that every established company developing personal grooming products is operating risk-free. What if your company is concerned that emerging customer pressure and local laws will make disposable razors difficult, if not impossible, to sell in the U.S. in ten years? Now you may be facing several kinds of risk. Will you be able to think up alternative products? If so, will customers be interested in the new ideas and able to incorporate those products into their daily routines? If so, will you be able to manufacture those products efficiently—or at all?

So when we say our conference is by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, we’re talking about people in any kind of organization—for-profit, non-profit, governmental, education, startup, Fortune 1000—who are responsible for developing products and services beyond the edge of what your organization can know through its or its competitors’ existing experience.

Often, in very young organizations, those people are simply the founders. In more established places, they may have nearly any job title. And in any organization, they can be technical, but they can fill other roles altogether. What they share is a need to learn a lot very quickly and the ability to adjust—sometimes subtly, sometimes radically--after incorporating new lessons.

2) Ok, I get it: the “startup” part of “Lean Startup” can be a lot of things other than two people in a garage with a couple of laptops. So what kinds of talks do all these entrepreneurs find valuable? Our attendees are hungry to learn more about the “lean” part of “Lean Startup”—how to learn quickly and effectively to reduce all that extreme uncertainty (the MBAs call this “de-risking”; it would be fair to call the MBAs “language assassins”).

Now, “lean” is often used to refer to a company’s financial situation, so it might make you think of a bootstrapped or under-funded organization. But when we talk about “lean,” we’re referring to the processes a company can use, when developing a new product or service, to learn quickly about the questions it has. (If you’re getting the sense that “Lean Startup” is neither “lean” nor “startup” as you’ve considered those words before, you’ve got the right idea.) We also care that those learning processes are as cheap as possible, so that you can try the maximum number of things as you’re learning before you run out of cash. “As cheap as possible,” though, is relative and may mean spending many thousands or millions of dollars to learn what you need to know.

For example, if your publishing company is thinking of putting out a coffee table book in the U.S. about cooking with insects, you might reasonably ask: Will anybody buy this? (You know you can produce such a volume; the processes you already use for publishing lavish books on baking cakes nearly all apply here.) One way to find out if anybody will buy the book is to go ahead and publish it. Commission the writer and photographer, assign an editor to develop the book with them, find people to test the recipes, get a copyeditor to review the final text, have production people layout the pages and correct the photos, hire a freelance indexer, get a pro to proofread the whole thing, and then ship it off to China for printing (and probably send a production expert to oversee the run). Oh, and your salespeople have to make sure bookstores will stock it, and your marketing and PR people will have to make sure readers know it exists. From the time you decided to find out if anybody will buy it until the time you’re able to actually test the idea using this approach is approximately two and a half to three years. Not to mention $200,000 in staff time and hard costs.

Or you could work with the writer to create a blog, see if it can attract a readership, and then test whether those readers will pre-order a book—which you can do before you’ve put ten seconds of effort into creating a print volume. Total time elapsed? Two to six months, and as a bonus, the readers test the recipes for you. Note that this isn’t a free process. You may have to pay the writer and photographer, and perhaps you’ll spend some money on training the writer to use blogging software and social media tools that help them build a following. Generously, it might cost you $20,000. In other words, you could test ten book ideas for the cost of publishing one. And because you can run your tests simultaneously, you could learn in several months rather than over the course of a decade or two which are worth investing more in.

At The Lean Startup Conference, our attendees are keenly interested in ideas like the blog approach—that is, they’re looking for ways they can quickly and cheaply generate and test more ideas to learn faster. There are a few ways your talk can help them:

You can provide advice on how a significant challenge—like a seemingly intractable and long-term development cycle—can be approached in new ways using Lean Startup methods. Last year, Danny Kim talked about how his company, Litmotors, was rapidly testing the market for totally new kinds of cars. While most of our attendees are not in the automotive sector, they could see ways to apply Litmotors’ thinking in their own organizations. Similarly, Diane Tavenner talked about the way Summit Schools had run short-term experiments within the fairly drawn out cycle of a school year. And Jessica Scorpio shared the way GetAround had used prototyping to test their very big idea.

You can give hands-on advice for a particular process that helps people learn, like A/B testing. Maybe you’ve got technical advice for getting the most out of A/B testing on software projects. Or maybe you’ve done A/B testing with a food-delivery service and you have advice about how to run real-world A/B tests. Or maybe you've realized that A/B testing has some significant problems that most people aren't aware of. Last year, Janice Fraser and Laura Klein ran a workshop on tools that you can use to validate ideas. Adam Goldstein talked about a particular live-chat tool that Hipmunk has used to learn more quickly than they realized was possible. Matt Brezina shared techniques for learning when you’re developing a mobile app—an environment that many people think resists rapid development.

You can give advice about working with other people when you’re using Lean Startup techniques. Perhaps you got fired up about MVPs two years ago, but it took nine months to convince your boss that there would be value in selling a product that didn’t yet exist—and now you can share the secrets of getting other people on board much more quickly. Last year, speakers from Intuit, Meetup, Knod.es, Neo, Change.org and BloomBoard all talked about how you can build internal support for Lean Startup. Dan Milstein talked about using the 5 Whys technique—and gave key advice for doing it better with your team.

You can give counter-intuitive advice on implementing Lean Startup techniques. Last year, the co-founders of Back to the Roots talked about their innovation accounting and how they were ignoring sales metrics in order to grow. Charles Hudson shared his hard decision to pivot from the iPhone to Android platform for his company’s games. Jocelyn Wyatt and Tendai Charasika both gave specific examples of how getting out of the building had yielded surprising results.

You can give advice about applying Lean Startup ideas to business areas other than product development. Last year, Stephanie Hay and Leah Busque both talked about Lean Startupping their marketing processes. George Bilbrey gave insight on using the methods on a sales team.

I’m sure you see the theme emerging here: our attendees want your advice, based on your experiences. They don’t need to be convinced that Lean Startup provides a compelling alternative to traditional product development, so we are not looking for talks about the fact that you’ve had success with Lean Startup in an unexpected sector or in a part of the world outside San Francisco. But if you’ve applied Lean Startup ideas, and you have experience to share that other people can use, our attendees may derive inspiration from an unusual context, like a story from the pharmaceutical industry or a startup in Nigeria.

Hopefully, you've also noticed that checking out last year's talks can be a good way to get a sense of what we look for. (The talks linked here all all take you to videos from last year.)

Our talks range from five minutes to three hours, and we structure them based on the information you have to share, so don’t worry too much about length. Focus instead on the advice you can give.

3) Cool—advice is key. Any particular themes you’re interested in this year? We’re looking for entrepreneurs’ stories from around the world and from different sectors that share deep learning. As this is the fourth year of the conference, and as noted above, we’re moving away from talks about the fact that somebody has applied Lean Startup in a place or company that’s unexpected and are instead focusing on advice from those people. If you need a theme to guide you, ask yourself: What advice can I give other people to help them achieve growth in their organizations?

Based on attendee requests, some of our talks this year will be more in-depth and targeted to segments of our audience. So if you have advice that you think is relevant only to people working in established corporations, or only to government employees, or only to non-profit leaders, or only to innovative educators, or only to engineers, no prob—you can indicate that in your application.

Do note that the conference is a no-hype zone (no pitches, no launches). Really, it's a place to learn and connect with other entrepreneurs. In addition to talks, the program will include peer-to-peer events for sharing ideas and meeting other entrepreneurs, along with structured mentoring.

4) I’m not a coder; should I bother to apply? Glad you asked. About half of our attendees are not technical, and very few of our talks focus on technical processes. So, no, you absolutely do not have to be a developer to give a talk. That said, we do have room this year for a handful of tech talks. So if you’ve got advice to share on implementing a continuous deployment framework, for example, we’re all eyes.

5) Do I have to follow the directions on the application form? Ok, nobody has asked this question yet. But I include it because we pretty consistently find that about a quarter of all applicants blow off the most important part of the form: the link to the two- to three-minute video you have made for us.

Note that that is not “the link to your website” or “the link to a video of you speaking at another conference” or “the link to a video of you being interviewed on tv.” We require that you create a video for us, and we give explicit directions on how to do so. Once you’ve come up with your talk idea, the video itself should take just a few minutes to create. Don’t let it be a barrier to applying. Do follow the directions. Applications are due by ~~May~~ 9 May 16 (we extended the deadline after Kathy Sierra volunteered to provide training for our speakers).

We look forward to reviewing your ideas.

Speak at the 2013 Lean Startup Conference

2013-04-18T10:29:00.002-07:00

This post was written by Sarah Milstein, co-host of The Lean Startup Conference.

Exciting news: we’ve nailed down dates for The Lean Startup Conference 2013. We’re holding it December 9 – 11 in San Francisco, with sessions at the Nob Hill Masonic Center and the Fairmont Hotel, a half-block away. This is the fourth year of the conference, and we’re acting on feedback last year’s attendees shared with us: as Lean Startup practices have evolved, you want in-depth talks, new speakers with fresh stories, and more time for structured networking and mentoring. So we’ve added an extra day and expanded into two larger venues--giving us the chance to offer hands-on breakout sessions, increase your chances of meeting fellow entrepreneurs with events that let you share ideas and learn together, and create active mentoring opportunities with real experts.

While we’ll have announcements before long about our keynotes, our focus right now is finding the other 95% of speakers for this year—most of whom we don’t already know. We know Lean Startup methods are being applied by people around the globe, in startups and established organizations alike, and in sectors of every stripe. This conference has always been about entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs, and most of the work is now being done by people we haven’t heard about. To find the great stories out there that other people can learn from, we’re opening our call for speakers today, and we’re seeking practitioners who are doing the real work, whether they’ve ever spoken at a conference before.

Just like last year, we're committed to having a merit-based speaker selection process. This is different from most conferences, so if you'd like to learn more about it, we've included details below. When you're ready to apply, check out our short application form.

Last year, we made a fairly big deal about looking for speakers outside our own networks. We noted that in previous years, the speakers had been excellent but had been limited to the pool of people Eric knew directly—and that had turned out to be mostly white men. When we broadened our search and aimed to find people based on the merit of their stories (rather than based on their proximity to us), we wound up with a speaker roster comprising approximately 40% women and 25% people of color - without using quotas.

We mention this now because we think that too many people don’t apply to speak at conferences because they make a reasonable assumption that they won’t be accepted. Our past record demonstrates that we’re committed to creating a transparent, merit-based selection process that not only serves applicants fairly but also delivers great ideas for attendees.

So how we can find people we don’t yet know who have very useful experiences we can all learn from? By asking all of you to help us find them, encourage them to apply, and convince them their stories are worth hearing.

Here’s the deal: If you have a Lean Startup experience to share--regardless of whether you’ve ever spoken publicly before--we ask that you propose a talk via our short application form. We require that you submit your idea in the form of a short video, but as the application explains, we don’t care at all about the quality of the video.

If you don't think you're qualified to speak at a conference like this, you're probably wrong! Most of our amazing speakers also feel that way. In fact, this is a well-documented and universal psychological feeling. So we hope you'll consider applying anyway. For new speakers we select, we’ll provide hands-on help developing presentations, plus speaker training.

A few notes:

* Although it's impossible to review a video blind (your speaking ability part of what we’re evaluating), we promise to review the written part of your application without being able to see for your name, ethnicity, sex or age. (This is the blind resume screening technique Eric has recommended elsewhere.)

* The Lean Startup Conference is a no-hype, no-launch event. Publicists and those seeking PR and media attention should look elsewhere.

* As you're refining your talk idea, bear in mind this IMPORTANT point: when we refer to "the Lean Startup," we mean specifically the set of ideas that Eric and others have articulated for testing, validating, and learning quickly. It's NOT about running a small company or a shoestring operation (though those can be smart things to do!), and we are NOT looking for talks about how to bootstrap or run a business on the cheap.

* Our attendees are entrepreneurs of all kinds - venture backed, bootstrappers, even entrepreneurs in corporate and government settings. We are seeking talks aimed at all segments of our audience: corporate entrepreneurs; educators; government innovators; non-profit and social impact leaders; and developers. The application form lets you tell us if your idea is of particular benefit to folks in these groups.

* We’re interested in all kinds of Lean Startup stories that other people can learn from. A straight-up story about how you followed Lean Startup principles at your organization and did pretty well with them is not useful for other entrepreneurs. Instead, tell us what you’ve learned. For example, if you’ve done lots of customer development, don’t suggest a talk reporting that; instead, tell us how you now do customer development in an unusual way that others might find useful. Or share what didn't work, or what took you by surprise. Or explain the obstacles you uncovered in applying Lean Startup in a counter-intuitive context, like a regulated industry. Or describe tactics that you’ve refined in an innovative way--say, a new take on A/B testing or continuous deployment.

* Do follow the directions in the application form and read them first before emailing questions. Seriously.

* The deadline is ~~Thurs, May 9~~ at midnight PT. It's now Thurs, May 16; we extended the deadline after Kathy Sierra volunteered to provide training for our speakers.

If you work with somebody--particularly a woman, person of color, or anybody else typically under-represented at tech conferences--who has relevant experience to share, please show them this post. Note, too, that we’re looking for speakers from all sectors. Again, here’s the new form. We look forward to learning from you.

How to make better decisions

2013-03-27T11:10:00.001-07:00

Those of you who have ever launched anything know just how precious the hours on launch day are. Yesterday, author Dan Heath took time out of his launch day to spend some time with me and answered some questions about his new book, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, co-authored with his brother Chip.

Dan also kindly asked his publisher to reserve 50 copies of the new book to give away to my readers. You can visit the Heath Brothers’ website and enter to win a free copy of Decisive.

Dan is a Senior Fellow at Duke University’s CASE center, which supports social entrepreneurs. Before Decisive, Dan and Chip wrote two New York Times bestsellers, Switch and Made to Stick.

I asked Dan a few questions about decision-making, including what decisions lead him and his brother to write this book.

ER: Thanks for taking the time out on launch day. What was the hardest decision you had to make while writing the book?

Dan Heath: I think the hardest decision was “which book to write,” honestly. After Chip and I finished up Switch, we had several ideas about what was next. Rather than agonizing over which was the right one to start with, we thought we’d just get started with all three and see, based on how the research developed, which one grabbed us. About six months in, we decided the decision-making topic was the one we were both most passionate about and the one where we could offer the most practical advice. And, actually, we talk about a similar concept in Decisive: the importance of “multitracking” your options when you have a difficult decision. We were inspired to do it ourselves because we’d just come across the research, which says that if you consider multiple options at once, it can yield better decisions. The reason is that you’re learning about multiple alternatives, along with their strengths and weaknesses, simultaneously. And not only that, but some researchers have found that it even speeds up your decision-making.

ER: That’s something I see a lot with startups and yet I think it’s actually sort of counterintuitive that doing this extra work—considering more options—will help you make a decision faster. How is that possible that you are doing more work, yet it’s faster?

DH: Exactly, we feel like we don’t have time to consider more options. It’s more work, and it’s slower. But the counterpoint comes from a researcher named Kathleen Eisenhardt at Stanford, who did a study of Silicon Valley firms and found that the firms that considered more options were actually faster for three basic reasons. The first is: When you consider multiple things simultaneously, you’re actually learning a lot about the shape of the problem—the important factors involved—and that knowledge makes you more confident and quicker to decide. The second piece is: When you consider multiple options, it depoliticizes the choice. When you have one option on the table, and the choice is “do we do this or not,” you get two camps fighting each other. You spend a lot of time bickering and arguing. Versus when you have multiple options, you can approach them more objectively and consider their strengths and weaknesses a bit more honestly. The third piece is maybe the most obvious: when you consider multiple options, you have a built-in fallback. So, if you go with Option A and for some reason it fizzles out, you’ve already got Option B teed up. But if Option A was the only thing you considered, you might exert a lot of energy trying to rescue or redeem it, and maybe try to make it work even to the point of absurdity. So that’s the case for considering multiple options.

ER: It sounds a lot like the decision that a lot of startups struggle with, which is trying to figure out if they should pivot to a new strategy or persevere with what they’re working on. I know you guys write about PayPal, for one, and there are really a lot of other companies that end up doing something quite different than what they started on. I was really struck thinking about the framework that you guys propose in the book, and that really is the psychological counterpart to this: the pivot decision is often one that has to be made by a team under a lot of stress, under adverse conditions where it seems like every psychological bias in the book seems to get in the way of doing it well.

DH: Right. In fact, the story we cite in the book about PayPal speaks exactly to that. What some of your readers may not know is that PayPal originally was designed as a way to secure financial transactions between PalmPilot users. The founder of PayPal, Max Levchin, had created this brilliant program to do secure transactions through PalmPilots, which is a very difficult thing to do. In fact, their first venture capital investment was actually beamed from PalmPilot to PalmPilot live in a restaurant in the Bay Area. Later, they built a web demo to demonstrate the functionality of the PalmPilot product—the idea was to lure people to the PalmPilot project. Then, to their surprise, the web demo really started to take off, and they started to attract a lot more interest in the web product than the PalmPilot product. Initially, this really frustrated them, because the PalmPilot product was much more technologically advanced. Levchin has this great quote about getting emails from people from this place called “eBay” who wanted to put the PayPal logo on their online payment options, and at first PayPal’s reaction was “no, no, go away!” We don’t want our logo on your owl macramé auction, thanks! But PayPal came to this point where they had to decide: okay, we have 12,000 users on our PalmPilot program and over a million on the online demo. What do we do? So they abandoned the Palm Pilot side.

On the one hand, it seems absurd to call this a “tough decision.” 12,000 users for one product versus over a million for the other! But it makes a ton of sense from the perspective of psychology. There are all these biases that were pulling PayPal toward the model that they started with. One of them is called mere exposure, which is the idea that we get more comfortable with things that we are more familiar with. The PayPal team grew up as a Palm Pilot company. The Palm Pilot was in their bones. It felt more familiar, more natural.

The second bias is loss-aversion. Losses are more painful to us than gains are pleasurable. So if you put yourself in the PayPal founders’ shoes, you start thinking “Yes, we could shift. Yes, there does seem to be a lot of enthusiasm on the web—but, what if we blow it? What if PalmPilots take over the world, and we threw away our advantage? What idiots we’ll look like to sacrifice our early lead for the sake of helping a bunch of flaky eBay sellers.” That IS a tough decision. And these forces are what complicate decisions like this, as you said, for entrepreneurs.

ER: Unfortunately, in the business school cases that get written about these things, things wind up looking really easy in retrospect, so the narratives we have make it seem, sometimes, like the founders must just have been idiots. Why didn’t they just make the obviously correct decision? But when you’re in the moment, it’s a totally different cognitive experience.

DH: Anyone who believes that business cases are the be-all and end-all of business education only needs to consider this fact: for years, Enron cases were a mainstay of the Harvard Business School curriculum. They were so innovative, you see! Then after the meltdown, those cases rather abruptly disappeared.

ER: Ha! A very principled stance. I was thinking about, when you were telling the PayPal story, this great story about Starbucks. People forget that Starbucks began as an Italian copy-cat café called Il Giornale—complete with Italian opera, and waiters with bow-ties. Howard Schultz wouldn’t even allow people to take the coffee to go! Because, you know, a porcelain cup is the only way you should be allowed to have real Italian espresso. But, eventually, they end up buying the Starbucks brand back from its owners and have this company meeting where they have to decide if they should go forward under the brand name ‘Il Giornale’ or Starbucks. And I love the fact that they even had to have a meeting about it!

But when you look at it through the framework you just laid out, they’d been working for years already at the Italian, very differentiated coffee shop concept and they were very invested in it, and you can imagine them feeling like, “What if we end up just being another bland American coffee purveyor and we miss a chance?”

DH: That story is a perfect example of what mars our decision-making so often. You’ve got a bunch of smart, passionate people sitting in a conference room staging all these arguments in their head. But what entrepreneurs have to realize is that the answers are in the world, not in our heads. There are no points for predicting right from inside a conference room. There are only points for getting it right in the real world.

And this is a case where what we talk about in Decisive overlaps very nicely with The Lean Startup because this speaks directly to the philosophy you have. We both talk about Scott Cook at Intuit and his willingness to get out of his head and stop being in the business of trusting his gut. He embraces the philosophy of “leadership by experiment,” which is about giving ideas a chance to prove themselves in the world.

As you write, Intuit runs sometimes up to seventy tests per week. But we can do this same thing with our personal decisions! I’ve talked to people who are agonizing, sometimes for weeks or months, over whether or not they should go back to school for social work or for counseling, and often these people haven’t spent a single day shadowing a social worker or counselor! I think one of the fundamental principles of decision making is that good decisions happen when we get out of our head and start taking information from the real world seriously.

ER: Amen. That is a core belief of everyone in the Lean Startup movement. Another question along these lines that I get a lot is: how do you know when you’ve collected enough information to make a good decision?

DH: That’s a great question. I think there are two gating factors. One is: have you considered enough options? One trap that people fall into is that they make “whether or not” decisions. They consider one alternative really seriously and the decision is “do we do that or not?” That’s a big problem, because adding incremental options really increases your chances for success. So one rule of thumb we talk about in the book is to fall in love twice—make sure you have at least two legitimate options before making your choice. (Don’t apply this to romantic decisions, though.) So, if you’re hiring someone, keep taking applications until you have at least two really good applicants. If you’re house shopping, make sure you keep looking until you have two really good options that you’d feel comfortable living in. That helps stop you from falling into the trap of rationalizing away the faults of your options.

So once you’ve got two or three options, then the question is: Have you gathered enough information from the world to tip you one way or another? And this is where Scott Cook provides a good example. Just run a test of some kind. If you have two or three good options, what kind of experiments can you run to get good, determinative information? Alternatively, you might make a values-based decision. You can ask yourself: which option is truest to your core priority?

For resolving personal decisions, we offer a useful question in the book: What would you tell your best friend to do in this situation?

ER: Yeah, project it onto somebody else.

DH: Exactly. I know that sounds simple. But I’ve had conversations with people who have reported agonizing about a decision for months, and then I’ve asked that question and they’ve had an answer in ten seconds. There’s something profound that happens when we create a little bit of distance by shifting perspectives.

ER: It’s almost ironic because a lot of us believe in a methodology called “net promoter score” in which you ask customers to recommend a product to a friend or colleague, and I’ve always thought of that as exploiting a bug in human psychology. It doesn’t actually predict peoples’ referral behavior very well—it actually predicts how much they like your product in the first place. So they’re projecting themselves on to their friends and colleagues and telling you what they feel. But if you ask them directly, they won’t tell you.

But I want to switch topics here, because one of the things I really like about all of your books is that you organize your ideas around a very simple mnemonic device. Here you have a really nice one for how to think through a decision: WRAP, which stands for:

Widen your options
Reality-test your assumptions
Attain distance before deciding, and
Prepare to be wrong.

I want to talk about my favorite of these, which is P for Prepare to be wrong. Because that’s the story of my life!

I think people think preparing to be wrong is setting themselves up for some sort of failure, or it’s some sort of self-sabotage.

DH: Yeah it sounds like we’re pitching some kind of defeatism. It’s not that at all actually, though. Psychologists tell us that we tend to be overconfident with our decisions, meaning that we think we know how things are going to turn out, but we’re often wrong. Ask anyone who has filled out an NCAA bracket and they can probably identify with this right now.

ER: Ha! Yes. I even used Nate Silver’s bracket and that didn’t turn out very well.

DH: Yes—and that was a pretty wise decision-making strategy by the way!

But when we talk about “Preparing to be Wrong,” it doesn’t mean that we should be pessimistic or bummed out. What it means is that we need to do a better job of stretching our sense of how the future might unfold. We need to consider positive and negative outcomes. Our minds often know more than we think they do. For instance, there’s a study that asks people to estimate the average box office haul for movies in the 1990’s that featured Angelina Jolie. And they were told to specify a range of box office totals that you believe are 80% certain to contain the true value. So, you and I might think, okay, somewhere between fifty and a hundred million dollars is going to capture that to 80% certainty.

But what they found is that the actual average fell outside of people’s ranges over 60% of the time, rather than the 20% you’d expect (since they were supposed to be 80% certain). People just did a horrible job estimating. But here’s the twist: The researchers did a separate study where they got people to probe for the extremes. They asked: what’s a high value for these Angelia Jolie movies that has only a 10% chance of being exceeded. Or, what’s a low boundary that has only a 10% chance of the number falling below it?

What happens when you stretch peoples’ thinking that way is that they start surfacing new knowledge. They start thinking, “Well hell, Tomb Raider was in the 90’s, wasn’t it?, and that was a huge hit and so that means the average will be skewed up.” For the lower bound, they’ll think, “But wasn’t she in some really strange indie films, and I bet those barely cracked a million bucks and maybe that drags the average down.” And all of a sudden you’re accessing this information that before was ignored or flattened out because we came to this quick conclusion about the average.

And I think the significance of that for entrepreneurs is obvious. Rather than making a prediction, treating the future like it’s a single point, we need to get people to stretch their expectations and begin, as much as possible, to start planning for the spectrum of possible outcomes. That’s preparing to be wrong. We need to start treating our decisions as predictions that could be right or wrong, rather than as a firm conclusion.

ER: Right. In the Lean Startup movement, we’ve been trying to get people to think of something that used to be called “requirements” in business-speak as “hypotheses” instead. They’re beliefs about what might happen. Everything you do is an experiment, whether you admit it or not. You’ll always have—whether you call them this or not—predictions about how things will go, and that’s a great opportunity for learning.

DH: That’s a beautiful sentiment and it dovetails so nicely with what we talk about in the book. People have such a sense of false permanence about decisions. There are some decisions, of course, where commitment is baked-in—marriage, say, or commitment to the armed forces, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule. The vast majority of decisions are nothing more than hypotheses. It’s: I think this going to be right job for me, the right place to live. We’ve got to stop treating our decisions as permanent and instead think of them as provisional. And of course, if you’re willing to make that leap, then it demands something of us. It means that when you make a decision, you’ve got to think about the circumstances under which you’d reconsider. What could you learn in 6 months that would convince you to go a different direction—or, conversely, convince you that it’s a great decision and worth doubling-down on?

ER: Well this sets me up perfectly to take advantage of your expertise and ask a question I’ve been wanting to ask you. One of the recommendations I make in The Lean Startup is that since you know you’re going to have to pivot, you’re gonna fail, you’re gonna make mistakes, you should schedule the pivot meeting in advance. Say, start the company today but in six weeks from today, let’s have a meeting to see if our strategy is still working, so that way it’s not a crisis that we’re having this meeting and in fact it’s perfectly normal. Is that a psychologically-sound recommendation?

DH: Yes. Absolutely. It sounds to me like we sort of wrote the same book with different terminology. We call that same idea in our book a ‘tripwire’—the notion that there’s something in the future that will snap us awake and force us to re-consider the decisions we’re making. The tripwire might be a metric we’re following, or a budget, or a date. So I’m 100% with you on that one.

ER: You have a notion in the book that you should not only have tripwires for problems in the book but also for unexpected successes.

DH: Yeah. There’s this great quote from Peter Drucker that I think sums it up really well [we looked up the full quote]:

When a new venture does succeed, more often than not it is in a market other than the one it was originally intended to serve, with products or services not quite those with which it had set out, bought in large part by customers it did not even think of when it started, and used for a host of purposes besides the ones for which the products were first designed. If a new venture does not anticipate this, organizing itself to take advantage of the unexpected and unseen markets…then it will succeed only in creating an opportunity for a competitor.

So part of what it means to be a great entrepreneur is to begin to sensitize your teams to the signs of unexpected threats or opportunities. This allows you to spot unexpected opportunities—novel ways that customers use your product, for instance. You must see this kind of thing a lot, given the work you do with entrepreneurs…

ER: Yeah. That really is the principle advantage to being in-market and doing experiments rather than any other type of market research. It really allows you to be truly surprised by what customers actually do. You see that in many of the stories we talked about today—Starbucks or PayPal or even you guys with the three books you were considering writing. I remember in a business that I was in, I was constantly targeting the wrong demographic—in that case I was going after older users who were casual gamers. But teenagers kept using my product, and it was a communication product, and I’d be like “Dammit! Another teenager! Stop clogging up my access to my target customer!”

The question I really want to ask is: if you’re opportunistic, and willing to change directions, how do you deal with the fear that you will inevitably compromise on your vision or abandon your core principles because you’re willing to do what’s popular? How do you reconcile the need for adaptability with this original goal?

DH: I think this gets down to needing our decisions to align with our core priorities. For entrepreneurs, that answer is going to differ based on what you consider your core priority. A lot of great entrepreneurs start out with the goal to serve a certain audience. If serving that audience well is your core priority, then you might burn through a dozen product/service ideas before you finally find one that succeeds. In other cases, your core priority might be to introduce some new idea to the world—some clever way to help people collaborate better, for example. And if that’s your anchor, then you might be willing to discard one audience for another if they embrace it more quickly. But it’s hard to make good decisions without an anchor, or if your only anchor is “I want to make as much money as humanly possible.”

ER: One last question. I was just thinking about—probably because I live in the Bay Area, and so this might come off as a little woo-woo—but I’m curious if this resonates with you. To me, the process of entrepreneurship is partly about the external world, but partly about self-discovery. In making the decision and putting it into practice, you actually discover something about yourself and what your core priorities really are. Does that resonate with you?

DH: Yeah—it does. It’s almost like the notion you talk about in your book called Minimum Viable Product, which is similar to what we talked about earlier: the importance of conducting small tests. (In the book, we call that “ooching”—to ooch is to test something or sample it.)

Let’s say someone wants to quit their job and go sell cupcakes. Rather than quit their job today, why not start a catering business or set up a booth on the weekend at a farmer’s market? Test it out a little. I think there’s something similar that happens for entrepreneurs, where you learn so much about who you are and what makes you tick just by doing stuff. And these are things you could not anticipate in advance. It’s only by virtue of running the experiment or conducting the ooch that you learn what’s important. And that brings us back to the idea that good decisions don’t start in our head; we find the answers in the world.

ER: Amen. I could not agree more. Thank you for taking the time.

Don't forget to click here to visit the Heath Brothers’ website and receive a free copy of Decisive.

Lean Analytics

2013-03-21T07:27:00.000-07:00

Lean Analytics is the latest addition to the Lean Series. The book has been a year in the making, and authors Ben Yoskovitz and Alistair Croll—themselves successful founders with several exits under their belts—spent much of that time speaking with founders, investors, and analysts to understand a really basic, but seldom-asked, question: What's normal? As it turns out, normal is a hard question. Normal depends on what kind of business you're in, and what stage of that business you're at. If you're working on the Sticky Engine of Growth, you're focused on very different metrics from those that you care about in the Viral Engine of Growth. Similarly, a two-sided marketplace cares about different things from a traditional e-commerce product.

Start with metrics in mind

To help with this, the book looks at dozens of metrics—such as churn, customer lifetime value, viral coefficient, acquisition cost, uptime, and engagement—and suggests where that metric should be before you can move on to the next stage of your business. Here's what they have to say about churn rates in SaaS businesses:

The best SaaS sites or applications usually have churn ranging from 1.5% to 3% a month. For other sites, it’ll vary depending on how you define “disengaged.” Mark MacLeod, Chief Corporate Development Officer at Freshbooks, says that you need to get below a 5% monthly churn rate before you know you’ve got a business that’s ready to scale. Remember, though, that if you’re surprising your subscribers in a bad way (i.e. billing them for something they didn’t know they’d ordered) then churn will spike during your first billing period, sometimes to 50%, so you should factor this into your calculations.

Matrix Partners' David Skok agrees with the 5% churn threshold, but only for early stage companies, and says that you have to see a clear path to getting churn below 2% if you want to scale significantly.

“In the early days of a SaaS business, churn really doesn’t matter that much. Let’s say you lose 3% of your customers every month. When you only have a hundred customers, losing three of them is not that terrible. You can easily go and find another three to replace them. However as your business grows in size, the problem becomes different. Imagine that you have become really big, and now have a million customers. Three percent churn means that you are losing 30,000 customers every month. That turns out to be a much harder number to replace.”

Not all SaaS companies are the same, of course. Certain products or services are very sticky, in part because of the lock-in users experience. Photo upload sites and online backup services, for example, are hard to leave—because there’s a lot of data in place. So churn for those product categories may be lower. On the other hand, in an industry with relatively low switching costs, churn will be substantially higher.

Social sites may have some tricks at their disposal, too. If users try to leave Facebook, they’re reminded that some of their close friends will miss them—along with pictures of those friends. This is an example of how an emotional tweak was supported later by the data: once implemented, this last-ditch guilt trip reduced deactivations by 7%, which at the time meant millions of users stayed on Facebook.

If you’re going to offer users an incentive to stick around—such as a free month or an upgrade to a new phone—you’ll have to weigh the cost of doing so against the cost of acquiring another customer. Of course, if word gets out that you’re incenting disgruntled users to stick around then many customers may threaten to leave just to receive the discount. And getting the word out is what the Internet is for.

Bottom line: Try to get down to 5% churn a month before looking at other things to optimize. If churn is higher than that, chances are you’re not sticky enough. If you can get churn to around 2.5% you’re doing exceptionally well.

Knowing what normal looks like is essential. If you don't know what normal is, you can't tell if your efforts are paying off. You don't know if you're at a point of diminishing returns and should focus on something else.

Finding your One Metric That Matters

But it's not enough just to know "normal". It's also vital to know what the most important metric is to your business right now. That's because one of the most precious resources a startup has is focus, and spreading your attention across dozens of metrics gets in the way of learning. Ben and Alistair call this focusing on the One Metric That Matters (OMTM), and it's a core theme of the book. The following table shows some examples of an OMTM based on stage and model:

Many Mores

The book goes into detail about how founders can move the needle a different stages of growth. For example, in the revenue stage—where the company is busy growing revenues and pouring a percentage of them back into user acquisition—there are several places where analytics and iteration can help increase revenues.

Sergio Zyman, Coca-Cola’s CMO, once said that marketing is about selling more stuff to more people more often for more money more efficiently.

Business growth comes from improving one of these five “knobs”:

More stuff means adding products or services, preferably those you know your customers want so you don’t waste time building things they won’t use or buy. For intrapreneurs, this means applying Lean methods to new product development, rather than starting an entirely new company.

More people means adding users, ideally through virality or word of mouth, but also through paid advertising. The best way to add users is when it’s an integral part of product use—such as Dropbox, Hotmail , or a project management tool that invites outside users—since this happens automatically and implies an endorsement from the inviting user.

More often means stickiness (so people come back), reduced churn (so they don’t leave) and repeated use (so they use it more frequently). Early on, stickiness tends to be a key knob on which to focus, because until your core early adopters find your product superb, it’s unlikely you can achieve good viral marketing.

More money means upselling and maximizing the price users will pay, or the revenue from ad clicks, or the amount of content they create, or the number of in-game purchases they make.

More efficiently means reducing the cost of delivering and supporting your service, but also lowering the cost of customer acquisition by doing less paid advertising and more word of mouth.

In the Revenue Stage, you need to figure out which “more” increases your revenues per engaged customer the most:

If you’re dependent on physical, per-transaction costs (like direct sales, or shipping products to a buyer, or signing up merchants) then more efficiently will figure prominently on either the supply or demand side of your business model.

If you’ve found a high viral coefficient, then more people makes sense, because you’ve got a strong force multiplier added to every dollar you pour into customer acquisition.

If you’ve got a loyal, returning set of customers who buy from you every time, then more often makes sense, and you’re going to emphasize getting them to come back more frequently.

If you’ve got a one-time, big-ticket transaction, then more money will help a lot, because you’ve only got one chance to extract revenue from the customer and need to leave as little money as possible on the table.

If you’re a subscription model, and you’re fighting churn, then upselling customers to higher-capacity packages with broader features is your best way of growing existing revenues, so you’ll spend a lot of time on more stuff.

Any founder knows that it's really, really hard work to identify the riskiest part of the business, then find the simplest way to validate or repudiate your business model with that risk in mind. To do this, you need metrics, and a mindset that turns everything into a learning an experience. As I said in the foreword to the book,

Ben and Alistair have done the incredibly hard work of surveying the best thinking on the metrics and analytics, gathering in-depth examples, and breaking new ground in presenting their own frameworks for figuring out what metrics matter, and when. Their work collecting industry-wide benchmarks to use for a variety of key metrics is worth the price of admission all by itself.

While Lean Analytics applies to startups, it's also valuable for companies selling to business customers, and to intrapreneurs within large organizations trying to change the status quo. That's because the cycle of learning and measurement is universal. But unlike startups, Intrapreneurs have to work within existing systems and ultimate hand over their successful new products to the host organization, which presents some unique challenges.

If you work in a company of any significant size, you owe your org chart to an enterprising General Superintendent of the railroad era named Daniel C. McCallum. In the 1850s, railroads were a booming business. Unfortunately for investors, they didn’t scale well. Small railroads turned a profit; big ones didn’t.

McCallum noticed this, and divided his railroad into smaller sections, each run by subordinates who reported back a standard set of information he defined. McCallum’s line—as well as other lines that copied this approach—thrived. McCallum’s model, inspired by his time as a soldier and the regimented hierarchies he had learned there, was then applied to other fields.

McCallum was the first management scientist, introducing controls, structure, and regulations in order to reduce risk and increase predictability at scale. Companies like Google and Apple know this, creating their own advanced research groups such as the Google X Lab.

Intrapreneurs aren’t trying to solve for safety and predictability. Their job is to take risks, and to uncover the non-obvious and the unpredictable. If you’re trying to provoke change and disrupt the status quo, then the organizations McCallum introduced are your kryptonite. You need to shield yourself, just as the engineers within the Skunk Works did decades ago. But you also need to coexist with the organization, because unlike an independent startup, the fruits of your labors must integrate with your host company.

What you make may cannibalize the existing business, or threaten employees’ jobs. People will behave irrationally. When Marc Andreesen famously said “software eats everything,” one of the things in its diet was jobs. When a software company introduces a SaaS version of their application, salespeople who make a living selling enterprise licenses get angry.

Inertia is real. If you’re asking people to change how they work, you’ll need to give them reason to do so. Consider an Apple store: there’s no central cash register, and they’ll e-mail you a receipt. It takes a fraction of the time to purchase something; but convincing an existing retailer to change to this model will require retraining and modifying store layout.

If you do your job well, you’ll disrupt the ecosystem. A traditional music label has relationships with distributors and stores. That made it hard to move into online music distribution, leaving the opportunity open for online retailers.

Your innovation will live or die in the hands of others. While it’s easy to be myopic about your work—and disdainful of what the rest of the company is doing—the two are one and the same. “When problems crop up it is easy to see things from your own point of view,” says Richard Templar in The Rules Of Work, “Once you make the leap to corporate speak it gets easier to stop doing this and start seeing problems from the company’s point of view.”

In their book Confronting Reality, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan list the six habits of highly unrealistic leaders: Filtered information; selective hearing; wishful thinking; fear; emotional overinvestment; and unrealistic expectations from capital markets.

Intrapreneurs need the opposite attributes to thrive—and many of those attributes are driven by data and iteration. You need access to the real information, and you need to go where the data takes you, avoiding confirmation bias. You need to set aside your own assumptions and preconceived notions, and you need to combine high standards with low expectations.

Data Yields Insights

In many of the book's case studies—there are thirty in all—analysis of the data yields an insight that unlocks product-market fit, such as the discovery of an adjacent market or the effectiveness of a different pricing model. Consider what happened to ClearFit, a SaaS recruiting software company, as described in the book.

ClearFit is a SaaS provider of recruitment software aimed at helping small businesses find job candidates and predict their success. When they started, founders Ben Baldwin and Jamie Schneiderman offered a $99/month (per job posting) package. “We kept hearing over and over that monthly subscriptions was the key to growing a successful SaaS business,” says Ben. “So that’s the direction we took, but it didn’t work as planned.”

Two things confused ClearFit’s customers: the price point and the monthly subscription. Ben and Jamie wanted to price ClearFit below what customers paid for job boards (typically $300+ per job posting), but customers were so used to that price point they were skeptical of ClearFit’s value at $99/month.

Ben says, “We don’t compete with job boards, we partner with them, but at the time it seemed reasonable to have a lower price point to garner attention.” Customers didn’t understand why they would pay a subscription fee for something that they would most likely use sporadically. “When a company needs to hire, they want to do it fast and they’re willing to invest at that moment in time,” says Ben. “Our customers are too small to have dedicated HR staff or recruiters that are constantly looking for talent, and their hiring needs go up and down frequently."

Ben and Jamie decided to abandon their low monthly subscription and switch to a model that their customers understood: a per job fee. ClearFit launched its new price point at $350 for a single job (for 30 days) and almost immediately saw three times the sales. The increase in volume and the higher price point improved revenue 10x.

“When we increased the price,” Ben says, “it was an important signal to our customers. They understood the model and could more easily compare the value against other solutions they use. Even though what we do is different than a job board, we wanted our customers to feel comfortable with purchasing from us, and we wanted to fit into how they budget for recruiting.”

In ClearFit’s case, innovating on the business model didn’t make sense. Ben says, “People don’t do subscriptions for haircuts, hamburgers and hiring. You have to understand your customer, who they are, how and why they buy, and how they value your product or service.”

ClearFit’s switch to a per job posting model may go against the popular grain of subscription-based SaaS businesses, but the company continues to see great success with 30% month-over-month revenue growth.

ClearFit initially focused on a subscription model for revenue, but customers misinterpreted their low pricing as a sign of a weak offering. They switched to a paid listing model, and tripled sales while improving revenue tenfold. Ultimately, the problem wasn’t the business model, it was the pricing and the messages it sent to prospects.

The company learned that just because SaaS is a recurring service doesn’t mean it needs to be priced that way. If your product is ephemeral—like a transient job posting—it might be better to offer more transactional pricing. Pricing is a tricky beast. You need to test different price points qualitatively (by getting feedback from customers) and quantitatively. Don’t assume a low price is the answer; customers might not attribute enough value to your offering.

This prescriptive, data-informed approach shows founders what to do, when. While every business is unique, the book provides a starting point for building your own model, creating your own metrics, and deciding when it's time to grow, when it's time to pivot, and when it's time to quit.

Ask Good Questions

As Ben and Alistair say in the conclusion:

"There’s never been a better time to know your market. Your customers leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs with every click, tweet, vote, like, share, check-in, and purchase, from the first time they hear about you until the day they leave you forever, whether they’re online or off. If you know how to collect those breadcrumbs, you have unprecedented insight into their needs, their quirks, and their lives.

This insight is forever changing what it means to be a business leader. Once, a leader convinced others to act in the absence of information. But today, there’s simply too much information available. We don’t need to guess—we need to know where to focus. We need a disciplined approach to growth that identifies, quantifies, and overcomes risk every step of the way. Today’s leader doesn’t have all the answers. Instead, today’s leader knows what questions to ask.

Go and ask good questions."

You can order Lean Analytics today.

The Lean Startup SXSW 2013

2013-03-06T14:00:00.002-08:00

We're back! Once again, along with my partners at 500 Startups, we are proud to present the most substantive track at SXSW: http://leanstartupsxsw.co/

There was a running joke last year that "the Lean Startup track was the only place at SXSW you couldn't get out of the building." That's because the room we were in was so packed, the only way to stay for the next session was to refuse to give up your seat. Luckily, in a room full of entrepreneurs, plenty of new businesses popped up to bring people food and water.

(If you want to see what all the fuss was about, you can watch complete video of last year's track courtesy of my friends at Udemy.)

Because of your tremendous enthusiasm (and possibly a few words from the fire marshall), SXSW has granted us a much bigger space this year to put on what may be the best lineup we've ever had. I've embedded the flyer for the event below, but the best way to see what we're doing is on the conference website - which we try to keep up-to-date with the inevitable flurry of last-minute changes. (This year, we're battling both the flu and the Congressional sequester.)

If you're planning to be in Austin, please come say hello. See you there!

THIS SATURDAY!
JOIN THE BIGGEST TECH EVENT @SXSW, featuring...

+ 1,000 startup founders, investors, and press!

SATURDAY, MARCH 9TH - Hilton Austin Downtown

KEYNOTES & CASE STUDIES FROM...

Vinod Khosla Founder	Dave McClure Founding Partner	Eric Ries Author
Steve Blank Serial Entrepreneur & Professor	Todd Park CTO	Travis Kalanick CEO & Co-Founder
Joe Zadeh Director of Product	Sam Shank Co-Founder & CEO	NEW! Nicole Lazzaro President
Udi Nir CTO	NEW! Seth Sternberg Co-Founder & CEO	Scott Chacon CIO

Kevin Hale

Senior Product Manager

NEW! Juan Diego Calle
CEO

Dharmesh Shah
Co-founder & CTO

Ross Snyder
Sr. Software Engineer

Steven VanRoekel
CIO

Dan Greenberg
Co-Founder & CEO

CHECK OUT THE AGENDA...

> Uber's "Reality Therapy 4 Startups": What U Need 2 Know NOW
> Steve Blank on why NOT to be an Entrepreneur
> Airbnb's Globetrotting Lessons: Building 4 a Global Market
> Vinod Khosla - The VC Legend: Interview w/ Dave McClure
> Eric Ries on Entrepreneurship: What He's Learned Along the Way
> GitHub's Secret 2 Success: Rethinking The Way We Work
> The Metrics Behind Hotel Tonight: Sam Shank Reveals It All
> The CTO & CIO of the USA: Innovating our Government
> Wufoo's 29,561% Return: Kevin Hale on Customer Development
> Etsy's [Backend] Transition: From Startup to Superpower
> Meebo's Pivot to Acquisition: Seth Sternberg's Pivot Metrics
> Under the Hood of ModCloth: CTO on Agile Development
> David BEATS the Goliath: The true story of .CO's rise to fame
> Tips from an Anti-Social Founder: Dharmesh Shah on culture

PLUS:
> 8:30am Mimosa Meetup - 1st come, 1st served, hosted by GitHib
> Grilled Cheese + Beer (not lean, but awesome) - hosted by Neo
> Elon Musk + Popcorn - hosted by DealFlicks, during SXSW keynote
> .CO hookups 4 startups: A SXSW favorite is back again!
> Mentor Sessions - Featuring experts in building + running startups

LEAN STARTUP MENTORS INCLUDE...

Patrick Vlaskovits
Author

Alistair Croll
Co-Author

+ JOIN US ON PLANCAST

APPLY TO JOIN THE AFTER-PARTY...

STAY #500STRONG ON THE INTERWEBS

OUR STARTUP LOVIN' PARTNERS...

Sneak preview of the new Lean UX Book

2013-02-23T13:28:00.000-08:00

Lean Startups require cross-functional teams working closely together. This is especially true when designing a great product. In this excerpt from the newest addition to the Lean Series, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden discuss the idea of collaborative design -- an opening up of the product design process to all members of the team -- and why they feel this way of working produces not just better products but better teams as well.

What follows is an excerpt from Chapter 4 (Collaborative Design) of Lean UX: Applying lean principles to improve user experience by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden

The most effective way I’ve found to rally a team around a design direction is through collaboration. Over the long haul, collaboration yields bet- ter results than hero-based design (the practice of calling in a designer or design team to drop in, come up with something beautiful, and take off to rescue the next project). Teams rarely learn or get better from working with heroes. Instead, designing together increases the design IQ of the entire team. It allows every member of the team to articulate his or her ideas. It gives designers a much broader set of ideas to draw upon as they refine the user experience. This collaboration, in turn, breeds increased feelings of ownership over the work being done by the entire team. Finally, collaborative design builds team-wide shared understanding. It is this shared under- standing that is the currency of Lean UX. The more the team collectively understands, the less it has to document in order to move forward.

Collaborative design is an approach that allows a team to create product concepts together. It helps teams build a shared understanding of the design problem and solution. It allows them to work together to decide which functionality and interface elements best implement the feature in their hypothesis.

Collaborative design is still a designer-led activity. It’s the designer’s responsibility not only to call these meetings but to facilitate them as well. Sometimes you’ll have one-on-one sessions with a developer at a whiteboard. Other times, you’ll gather the whole team for a Design Studio exercise. The key is to collaborate with a diverse group of team members.

In a typical collaborative design session, teams sketch together, critique the work as it emerges, and ultimately converge on a solution that they feel has the greatest chance of success. The designer, while still producing designs, takes on the additional role of facilitator to lead the team through a series of exercises.

The output of these sessions typically consists of low-fidelity sketches and wireframes. This level of fidelity is critical to maintaining the malleability of the work, which allows the team to pivot quickly if their tests reveal that the approach isn’t working. It’s much easier to pivot from a failed approach if you haven’t spent too much time laboriously documenting and detailing that approach.

Collaborative Design in Practice

In 2010, I was designing a dashboard for a web app targeted at TheLadders’ recruiter and employer audience. There was a lot of information to fit on one screen and I was struggling to make it all work. Instead of burn- ing too much time at my desk pushing pixels, I grabbed a whiteboard and called the lead developer over. I sketched my original idea about how to lay out all the content and functionality for this dashboard. We discussed it and then I handed him the marker. He sketched his ideas on the same whiteboard. We went back and forth, ultimately converging on a layout and interaction schema that was not only usable but feasible given our two- week sprint timeframes (see Figure 4-2). At the end of that two-hour session, we returned to our desks and started working. I refined our sketch into a more formal wireframe and workflow and he began to write the infrastructure code necessary to get the data we needed to the presentation layer.

We had built a shared understanding through our collaborative design session. We both knew what we were going to build and what it needed to do. We didn’t need to wait to document it. This approach allowed us to get the first version of this idea built within our two-week timeframe.
Figure 4-2. Whiteboard sketch that we arrived at together.

Style guides

One tool that makes collaborative design easier is the style guide. A style guide is a broadly accepted pattern library that codifies the interactive, visual, and copy elements of a user interface and system. Style guides (also known as pattern libraries) are a living collection of all of your product’s customer-facing components. If it’s made of pixels, it goes in the style guide. Headers, footers, grids, forms, labels, button logic, and everything else that goes into your product’s user experience goes in the style guide. Because they capture all of the detailed elements of your design system, your collaborative work sessions can focus on customer need, business problem, interaction, flow, structure, business rules—all things that are productive to work on in a team setting.

Some companies use wikis for their style guides, which allows the collection to stay current and accessible to everyone on the team. Other teams choose to create “live” style guides. These are repositories of front-end code and design that not only define how the product looks and behaves, but actually function as the underlying markup and stylesheets for that experience. If you change the style guide, you change the product.

Style guides create efficiency. They provide a repository of ready-to-go, approved interface components that can be assembled and aligned to form a workflow. By minimizing debate over mundane elements like the placement of labels in forms or the never-ending debate over left/right placement of the “positive” action button, developers can get started creating core UI components without waiting for a designer to define and specify these assets. The assets are already designed, defined, and collected in one place.

Interaction and visual designers benefit as well. They no longer have to recreate representations of experiences that already exist. They become free to focus on new design challenges—novel interaction problems or extending the visual system to new elements. Approval cycles are streamlined because the repetitive elements (e.g., the treatment of the global navigation) are no longer up for debate. Reviews become more focused on the core product challenge and broader views of the proposed solution.

Creating a Style guide

There are two basic approaches to creating a style guide:

Big bang
In this approach, your team takes a limited amount of time (e.g., one to two weeks or sometimes months) away from their current efforts to document all of your product’s UI elements in a style guide. The benefit here is that the style guide gets created in a relatively short amount of time. The negative is that your team is not learning anything new about your product during this time.

Slow drip
In this approach, your team adds an element to the style guide each time they create or change one for the project. The biggest benefit here is that the team continues to work on the project. However, the drawback is that the style guide is rarely completed and therefore fails to provide some of the efficiencies that a complete one does.

Maintaining a Style guide

When planning your style guide, it’s important to plan for maintenance. You’re going to need to create a process and dedicate people to keeping your style guide up to date. Think of a style guide as a living process that you launch and maintain, rather than a static thing you create. When you have an up-to-date and easy-to-use style guide, you make it easy for the team to actually use the style guide—and your goal should be to make it easier to use the style guide than to avoid it. You want to make compliance easy! So plan to dedicate people and time to keeping your style guide current.

Want to read more? Order the book.

Interested in applying these ideas but not sure where to begin? The authors are also the organizers of Lean Day: UX, March 1st, 2013 in NYC, brings together 9 practitioners of Lean Startup and Lean UX in the enterprise sharing case studies of how they put these tactics to use every day.

The Lean Entrepreneur is here

2013-02-07T10:24:00.000-08:00

Last May, I shared the news that long-time Lean Startup advocates Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits were working on a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur featuring illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. That new book is about to hit bookstores everywhere.

I was honored that they asked me to write the foreword, and with their permission I'm posting an excerpt below. After the 2012 conference I viewed it as an opportunity to reflect on the growth and evolution of the movement as a whole.

One of the things that I love about what Brant and Patrick have done with The Lean Entrepreneur are the numerous case studies of how entrepreneurs are tackling new ventures, minimizing risk and learning their way to success - these case studies will speak to garage startups and corporate entrepreneurs alike.

A few of the detailed case studies include:

Tech legend Bill Gross building an MVP in 1999 to test demand for online car sales, which grew into CarsDirect.com.
LitMotors approach to using Lean Startup to create a new vehicle category.
AppFog creating "high-hurdle" experiments to surface authentic early adopters with real pain.
The Embrace infant warmer was developed - by getting out of the country -- and how Rob Emrich learned and scaled his non-profit, Road of Life. (Social entrepreneurs take note!)
BetaBrand building apparel MVPs and testing them quickly with targeted customer communities.
Telecom O2 learning to move at the speed of the internet
500 Startups and their accelerated feedback loops on what works, and what doesn't work in early-stage investing.
Scott Summitt iteratively leveraging the emerging technologies of digital fabrication and 3d-scanning to change people's lives.
PayPal, under the leadership of David Marcus and Bill Scott, re-defining and re-engineering itself by embracing Lean Startup to improve the product experience.
KISSmetrics building and empowering cross-functional teams to attack problems in their sales funnels via hypothesis testing.
Intuit showing large organizations how to combine Lean Startup with horizon planning to nurture internal innovation and startup experiments.
Berkeley Pizza: from pizza in the farmer's market to a sit-down restaurant.

Another thing I love about The Lean Entrepreneur is how Brant and Patrick are treating their book like a startup. One example is in their marketing, which in today's environment requires providing value. This doesn't mean pointing to the product and describing the product's value, but rather the marketing provides value itself.

As part of their book campaign, Brant and Patrick have teamed up with General Assembly to offer 4 free online video classes, including:

Lean UX Research Techniques - Rapid Prototyping - How to Hire Developers - Growth Hacking

Every book pre-order get access to all of these classes - and quite a bit more. You can pre-order on their site until February 10^th 2013, and after that on Amazon.

Lastly, I wanted to share with you the foreword I wrote for The Lean Entrepreneur. As we head into 2013, it's a good time to reflect on how far the Lean Startup movement has come:

When I first started blogging in August of 2008, I had no idea what to expect. Startup blogging was hardly "cool" back then. Plenty of venture capitalists advised me against it.

My personal background was as an engineer and my companies had been Web-based startups, so that is what I wrote about. Struggling to explain the successes and failures of those companies, I discussed principles like continuous deployment, customer development, and a hyper-accelerated form of agile. When I delved into lean manufacturing, I discovered the concepts and terminology dovetailed. The result: a new idea I called The Lean Startup.

I started with some basic theory: that a startup is an institution designed to thrive in the soil of extreme uncertainty; that traditional management techniques rooted in forecasting and planning would not work well in the face of that uncertainty. Therefore, we needed a new management toolkit designed explicitly for iteration, scientific learning, and rapid experimentation.

At the time, I viewed it as incidental that the theory might be tied to a particular industry, such as high-tech startups or web-based environments. Lean, after all, emerged from Toyota, a huge automobile manufacturing company. I simply stated my belief that Lean Startup principles would work in other types of startups and in other areas of business where uncertainty reigned.

Boy, was I unprepared for what happened next. I was hopeful that we would change the way startups are built - but I didn't know.Fast-forward more than 4 years and I'm astounded by what has emerged. A nascent community has blossomed into a full-fledged movement. Entrepreneurs, both new and experienced, proudly share their Lean Startup learning in case studies, conferences, and many, many blogs. Books, workshops and courses authored by passionate practitioners relate experience, share insight, and create tools to teach students ways to make Lean Startup principles their own. Many investors, advisors, mentors and even celebrity entrepreneur icons speak the Lean Startup language.

It's a big tent. We stand on the shoulders of giants: customer development, the theory of disruptive innovation, the technology life-cycle adoption theory, and agile development. Complementary lines of thinking, such as that of user experience professionals, design thinking practitioners and the functional disciplines of sales, marketing, operations and even accounting, come together to share practices that lift us all.

Lean Startup has gone mainstream. I wish I could say that this was all part of some master plan, that I knew all along that companies of all sizes - far outside the high-technology world - would embrace Lean Startup. I wish I had foreseen that within a year of publishing The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Achieve Radically Successful Businesses, many large organizations, including such monsters as the United States Federal government (!) would have recognized that to cope with today's world -faster, more competitive, and inundated with data - new methods are needed to keep up. The truth is that all of this change has happened faster and more thoroughly than any of us imagined. And - as you're about to see - we're just getting started.

That's why I am so excited by the volume you hold in your hands. The Lean Entrepreneur is about those new methods. Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits are among the earliest adopters of new ideas such as Lean Startup and customer development. Their new work turns their lens on three primary focal points: how to interact with customers, run experiments, and use actionable data to move the needle of any uncertain business endeavor.

As with all of their work, theirs is not just a book of theory. Brant and Patrick provide great tactical depth in each of these areas.

They endeavor to answer the question: No matter where you are as an organization, how do you know where to focus your Lean Startup activities? The Lean Entrepreneur offers new thinking, tools and activities that help organizations identify and act upon business model challenges in a waste-eliminating manner. Following the precepts of traditional lean thinking, Brant and Patrick introduce the value stream discovery process, which helps organizations hypothesize what they must do, including product development, marketing, and sales in order to create value. These business model assumptions are then ripe for testing, measuring and iterating upon.

Further, the value you create is meaningless without a customer who needs, wants, desires and ultimately, determines the final value of your creation. Brant and Patrick spend considerable time helping you think through your customer segments. Cleverly and in the spirit of the scientific method, they even help you discover where your customer theory is wrong.

Everyone likes a good story; Brant and Patrick interviewed dozens of entrepreneurs and documented numerous case studies both inside and outside of high-tech, in both startups and large enterprises. There's even a classic Wizard of Oz minimum viable product that dates back to 1998!

Make no mistake, Brant and Patrick have been here since the beginning. They self-published The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development in April of 2010
From the outset, they were both practitioners and mentors, urging entrepreneurs not to follow a paint-by-numbers approach, but rather to think lean: fast, agile and continuously learning. Over the last two years they've traveled around the world speaking, advising, and teaching Lean Startup.

The Lean Entrepreneur is an important addition to the growing library of principles and practices designed to improve how we tackle innovation and uncertainty, be it in tech startups, Fortune 100, non-profits or government.

I consider myself lucky to count Brant and Patrick as friends and colleagues. It is my hope that from this book you will gain valuable insights, make Lean Startup your own, and - much more importantly - that you are successful in changing the world for the better.

Eric Ries,
San Francisco, December 2012

If you want to read more, you can find an excerpt of Chapter 6, Viability Experiments here.

Presidential Innovation Fellows, round two

2013-02-05T06:00:00.000-08:00

Yes, there are Lean Startups even in the United States federal government. I know this is an unpopular thing to say, since it sounds so patently absurd. But I've seen the teams with my own eyes and witnessed their results first hand. For my take on how this is possible, you can see my previous post on Lean Government here. Today, I'm excited to share the latest round of startups that are being run by the Presidential Innovation Fellows program. If you'd like to try your hand at being an entrepreneur inside one of the world's largest bureaucracies, you can apply right here starting today.

I've excerpted descriptions of the program and summaries of all the projects below. Take a look and judge for yourself.

The Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program pairs top innovators from the private sector, non-profits, and academia with top innovators in government to collaborate during focused 6-12 month “tours of duty” to develop solutions that can save lives, save taxpayer money, and fuel job creation. Each team of innovators is supported by a broader community of interested citizens throughout the country.

The 1st round of five projects – MyUSA (formerly known as MyGov), RFP-EZ, Blue Button, Better Than Cash, and Open Data Initiatives – launched in August 2012 with 18 inaugural Fellows. Each of these five project teams have made remarkable progress.

The 2^nd round of the Presidential Innovation Fellows program will include nine projects, described below – four that are the second phases of Round 1 projects and five new projects. Presidential Innovation Fellows have a unique opportunity to serve our Nation and make an impact on a truly massive scale. We will be accepting applications to be a Round 2 Fellow from February 5 through March 17, and are looking to put together a dynamic, diverse, innovative class that will produce tremendous results for the American people.

WhiteHouse.gov/InnovationFellows has information about the program, past PIFs, and will serve as the gateway through which to apply (just click on the “Apply Here” button starting February 5^th)

Those interested can follow @WhiteHouseOSTP on Twitter and can discuss the program on social media using: #InnovateGov

Applications to be a Round 2 Fellow will be accepted through March 17^th

Disaster Response & Recovery

Collaboratively building and “pre-positioning" needed tech tools ahead of future emergencies or natural disasters in order to mitigate economic damage and save lives.

During an emergency or natural disaster, it is essential that first responders, government agencies, volunteers, the private sector, and the public have access to real-time information about the critical needs of survivors and resources that can help them. The goals of the Disaster Response & Recovery project are to: (1) identify information critical to saving lives and mitigating damage in a disaster; (2) identify existing and new tools to be built and deployed that can collect, synthesize and distribute that information; and (3) build out these tools and train disaster response personnel in their use.

Once these tools are built and rolled out, they can be used collaboratively by the private sector, first responders, local officials, volunteers, and survivors themselves in order to get information where it needs to be in real-time. This improved ability to collect and disseminate information will support disaster response and recovery efforts for years to come. The potential savings – in terms of both American lives and taxpayer dollars – are dramatic.

MyUSA

Simplifying the process of finding and accessing information and government services that are right for you. Helping American businesses access the information and services that will help them grow, hire American workers, and export to foreign markets.

MyUSA (formerly known as MyGov) is creating a new service that helps Americans find the information and services they need across the Federal Government. Rather than organizing services around the agencies that deliver them, as most Federal websites do today, MyUSA organizes services around people and the specific tasks they need to complete. Building on the work of the inaugural class of MyUSA Presidential Innovation Fellows, motivated by President Obama's call for a smarter, leaner government, and inspired by innovative models of collaboration in the private sector, the US Chief Technology Officer, the US Chief Information Officer, and the White House Director of Digital Strategy will work closely with and support the Round 2 MyUSA Fellows as they take the MyUSA service to the next level.

In particular, small businesses and exporters have a fundamental problem navigating the Federal Government’s myriad resources. It can be difficult to locate information about government assistance programs or find and complete the correct forms for taxes or business operations. MyUSA is working to solve these problems. The project team will build and beta-test new features and tools for entrepreneurs and businesses with the purpose of cutting red tape, increasing efficiency, and supporting American businesses and American jobs.

MyUSA will save people and businesses time when transacting with the government, increase awareness of available government services, and speed up notifications and updates. MyUSA has the potential not only to save Americans time and money, but to reshape how they interact with and view their government.
@ProjectMyUSA on Twitter.

RFP-EZ and Innovative Contracting Tools

Making it easier for the government to do business with small, high-growth tech companies, and enabling the government to buy better, lower-cost tech solutions from the full range of American businesses.

RFP-EZ improves the operations of government by making it easier for small businesses to sell their services to government buyers, and by making it easier for contracting officers within government to navigate the process of purchasing. In Round 1 of the PIF program, the RFP-EZ team opened the door to small businesses by building a platform for small, creative businesses to more effectively sell to the Federal Government. The objective of the RFP-EZ 2.0 team is to improve upon the existing product and scale the tool across additional government agencies so that fewer taxpayer dollars are spent getting the technology that government needs to do its work for the American people.

As RFP-EZ is tested and scaled, a new effort will be launched to improve Federal procurement by building a portal of prices paid by agencies under their contracts. Improved information sharing, both within and between agencies, about prices paid for common-use goods and services will make it easier for agencies to find “best in class” spending options. More informed decision making promises to help save substantial amounts of money each year by pooling resources in the vehicles that offer the best value for the taxpayer.

RFPEZ.SBA.gov and follow @ProjectRFPEZ on Twitter.

Cyber-Physical Systems

Working with government and industry to create standards for a new generation of interoperable, dynamic, and efficient “smart systems” – an “industrial Internet” – that combines distributed sensing, control, and data analytics to help grow new high-value American jobs and the economy.

The emerging “industrial Internet” revolution, enabled by the convergence of networking and information technology with engineered physical systems and associated services, is enabling a new generation of “smart systems” and an innovation-based growth engine for the U.S. economy in a broad range of industries including manufacturing, transportation, energy, healthcare, defense, agriculture, and emergency response. These cyber-physical systems (CPS) will combine distributed sensing, monitoring, actuation, and control networks with interoperable systems integration, advanced analytics, and user interfaces featuring customized degrees of autonomy to enable adaptive, predictive, and collaborative optimization of system performance over the entire life cycle of a device (e.g. design, build, operate/use, maintain, and service). These innovations could lead to entirely new markets and platforms for growth in the economy, increase U.S. competitiveness, catalyze the creation and retention of U.S. jobs, enable cost-effective renewable clean energy, enhance national security, and help support affordable health care and improved quality of life for our citizens.

Realizing this potential will require partnerships between industry and government to develop a framework and best practices for cyber-physical-systems platform technologies that include integrated architectures, standards and protocols, advanced analytics, evaluation testbeds, and reference implementations to ensure such systems perform reliably, correctly, safely and securely. These platform technologies will leverage advances in control systems and process engineering, big data and cloud computing, broadband communications, and cybersecurity.

Open Data Initiatives

Accelerating and expanding efforts to make government information resources more publicly accessible in “computer-readable” form and spurring the use of those data by entrepreneurs as fuel for the creation of new products, services, and jobs.

The Open Data Initiatives project is “liberating” government data and voluntarily-contributed corporate data to fuel entrepreneurship, create jobs, and improve the lives of Americans in tangible ways. As a model, decades ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began making weather data available for free electronic download by anyone. Entrepreneurs used these data to create weather newscasts, websites, mobile applications, insurance, and much more. Similarly, the government’s decision to make the Global Positioning System (GPS) freely available has fueled a vast array of private-sector innovations ranging from navigation systems to precision crop farming, creating massive public benefit and contributing significantly to economic growth. More recently, the Health Data Initiative, launched by the Institute of Medicine and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2010, has opened growing amounts of health-related knowledge and information in computer-readable form from the vaults of the government and publicized the availability of these data to entrepreneurs and innovators. Hundreds of companies and nonprofits have used these data to develop new products and services that are helping millions of Americans and creating jobs of the future in the process.

Working closely with the US Chief Technology Officer, the US Chief Information Officer, and an array of agencies, the Open Data Initiatives team has launched and is continuing to scale open data efforts in Health, Energy, Education, Finance, Public Safety, and Global Development. These efforts involve government releasing general data resources in computer-readable form and in accordance with policies that rigorously protect privacy. The goal is to stimulate a rising tide of private-sector entrepreneurship that leverages these data to create tools that help Americans find the right health care provider for them, identify the college that provides the best value for their money, save money on their electricity bills through smarter shopping for the right rate plan, keep their families safe by knowing which products have been recalled, and much more – a rising tide of innovation that also contributes to economic growth and creates jobs.

@ProjectOpenData on Twitter.

For Round 2, we are looking for Presidential Innovation Fellows to work on the existing Open Data Initiatives in Health, Energy, Education, Finance, Public Safety, and Global Development, as well as the following new data innovation efforts:

Building Virtual Learning at National Scale

Harness new techniques in big data and learning analytics to help students master core academic subjects such as math and science.

Digital Tools for the Smithsonian

Develop new ways for the Smithsonian Institution to engage in the historic effort to make its unparalleled collections in science, history, art, and culture more open and available to the American public – from researchers to schoolchildren and everyone in between.

Data.gov

Build upon the success of Data.gov (launched in 2009) – and recent improvements such as Alpha.Data.gov – to create an optimal hub for the growing open data work of the Federal Government.

@USDataGov on Twitter.

MyData Initiatives

Empowering the American people with secure access to their own personal health, energy, and education data.

The MyData Initiatives seek to spread the ability for people to securely access to their own data while spurring the growth of private-sector applications and services that a person can use to crunch his or her own data for a growing array of useful purposes.

Existing MyData Initiatives are paving the way. For example, through Blue Button – a growing initiative across the public and private sectors – patients can download their own health information from a growing array of organizations (the Department of Veterans Affairs’s health system, private-sector health care providers, etc.) and securely share their medical histories with caregivers, import their prescription histories into mobile reminder apps, and more. Similarly, the Green Button team at the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institute of Standards and Technology is working collaboratively with industry to enable millions of residential and commercial energy customers to securely download their own energy usage data in a standardized machine-readable format directly from their utilities. The MyData Initiative at the U.S. Department of Education is empowering learners of all ages in hundreds of school districts to access machine-readable copies of their academic transcripts and student loan/grant histories, including their own Federal student loan and FAFSA data.

The Round 2 MyData team will work with public sector and private sector organizations to continue to expand the ability for Americans to securely and privately access their own data from wherever it might be, and encourage the development of private-sector tools and services that help people utilize their own data for their own benefit.

@ProjectBlueBtn on Twitter.

Innovation Toolkit

Developing an innovation toolkit that empowers our Federal workforce to respond to national priorities more quickly and more efficiently.

Inspired by President Obama’s pledge to “make government cool again,” the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, in connection with the General Services Administration and the U.S. Department of State, will lead an effort to apply technology to augment and tap into the skills, creativity, and capacity for innovation of the Federal workforce. There are a variety of ways the Federal Government can improve the efficiency and productivity of its talented people – by connecting employees through an intuitive online collaboration platform, by providing opportunities for online learning and skills sharing (particularly since 85% of the Federal workforce is located outside of the Washington, DC metro area), and by offering dynamic libraries of case studies, guides, and “how to” documents – an “innovation toolkit” – for employees looking to think out-of-the-box without having to reinvent the wheel. Using these and other tools, we can deliver on President Obama’s call for a smarter, leaner government and enable the Federal workforce to deliver greater value to the American taxpayer by saving time, money, and resources.

21^st Century Financial Systems

Moving financial accounting systems of Federal agencies out of the era of unwieldy agency-specific implementations to one that favors more nimble, modular, scalable, and cost-effective approaches.

The Federal Government has traditionally approached new financial system implementations by focusing on implementing commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) packages and adapting them to agency-specific needs. This approach has resulted in many cost and schedule over-runs, aborted implementations, and overly complex systems that are not used to their full potential. The Office of Management and Budget and the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Financial Innovation and Transformation (FIT) are charting a new course for Financial Systems focused on using shared services, standardized requirements, and fewer agency-specific tweaks. The 21^st Century Financial Systems project is focused on designing and building an evidence-based “test” that Treasury will use to ensure agencies don’t put out over-engineered requirements. The key to this effort will be designing and implementing a credible and efficient process to determine which agency deviations from a standard set of requirements are truly required and what would be the best way to accommodate those deviations. The success of this program could lead to dramatic and lasting cost savings on behalf of American taxpayers.

Development Innovation Ventures

Enabling the US government to identify, test, and scale breakthrough solutions to the world’s toughest problems.

Great ideas and breakthrough solutions come from all kinds of different places, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has recently pioneered a competitive method for sourcing and scaling innovations to drive faster, more cost effective, and more reliable results. It uses staged financing to make small investments in promising approaches and technologies and larger investments when there is clear evidence that the method is producing significant results. It accepts proposals from startup or established businesses, social enterprises, academic institutions or non-profits, both domestically and internationally. Over 2000 proposals have been reviewed and over 40 investments made across the world in a wide range of sectors, with many more under negotiation.

Building on this innovative approach to government financing, there are opportunities to scale this effort to reach millions of people more quickly and ensure that the program structure is sustainable (through either profitability or host country adoption, not long-term donor support). Of particular interest would be supporting enterprises that are scaling through the private sector. In addition, there is a desire among domestic Federal Government agencies to optimize the use of taxpayer resources and further their missions by adapting this model of broad competitions and tiered funding for additional missions, to produce the most cost-effective, evidence-based, and scalable solutions.

USAID.gov, and @DIVatUSAID on Twitter.

Join a conference simulcast near you

2012-12-01T09:40:00.001-08:00

One of the most important things we do with The Lean Startup Conference is make a livestream of the plenary talks available for free to groups around the world, supporting entrepreneurship communities everywhere. The number of hosts has grown annually, and this year, we have 200+ groups joining us on Monday, December 3. They represent more than 10,000 people total. If you're not attending the conference in person, consider meeting up with one of these groups to watch. Past livestream attendees have reported great conversations and networking. Most simulcasts are free, although some charge a small fee to cover their costs. All require RSVP in advance, so please sign up via their page linked below.

The following sites are confirmed livestream hosts. Click through to sign up at any given location, and if you have questions, you can contact the host directly.

If you don't see a city near you, please check the conference livestream page - we are constantly adding more venues as they get confirmed.