Lean Startup

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

When Microsoft acquired Yammer last year, one of employees it gained was Cindy, an expert in applied Lean Startup techniques. Cindy will be joined Microsoft principal program manager Ethan Gur-esh to talk about how they’re transitioning teams into a Lean Startup mindset and away from the three-year planning waterfall cycles of the past.

With unmatched experience as entrepreneurs and investors, Marc and Chris have insights to share that are directly useful for almost any business trying to innovate. Eric Ries will interview Marc and Chris.

A strong speaker last year, Navarrow returns with the origin story of his new initiative. He’ll talk about how using Lean Startup principles helped him understand how to engage new audiences and create more diverse teams within an organization.

One of the top pieces of advice you can take when you’re trying to innovate more effectively is this: work in cross-functional teams. But most companies are structured in silos: design, development and product management work separately, with communication and collaboration relegated to weekly check-ins and designs and feature requirements thrown over the fence. Drew will talk about how to build cross-functional teams that actually function and can test ideas at market pace.

The key to running effective experiments is to first frame the experiment thoughfully. This takes time, but the investment pays off many-fold. Zach will guide you through the key steps of framing, which, when done properly, reward your brain–and your organization–with learning.

With a long history at the Lean Enterprise Institute, John brings an incredibly rich view of innovation in the corporate world. As our community pushes Lean Startup ideas forward, he brings a valuable ability to ground our greater understanding.

Intuit has been at the forefront of incorporating Lean Startup methods across a very large company. CEO Brad Smith will lead a conversation with two senior Intuit executives, Laura Fennell and Hugh Molotsi, about how they’ve fostered and rewarded an environment of experimentation and how they’ve transformed how decisions are made in their businesses.

Continuous deployment–small, frequent, and continuous changes to the production website–let marketplace giant Etsy iterate quickly and experiment with new features rapidly. But it’s not an approach that every engineer is comfortable with. John will talk about how Etsy does continuous deployment and gets the team behind it.

What’s the reality of building an audience for your product or company? Kathryn’s story of getting initial users when she needed feedback early on is instructive.