Lean Startup

As the founder and CEO of Idealab, Bill Gross has started more than 100 companies, with MVPs of all kinds. This afternoon, he’ll share his best advice for making them successful–and this morning, as an experiment within the conference, he’ll share a preview of that talk from the main stage.

When a team at Google felt uncertain about which pieces of their work drove real value for customers and had an impact on the bottom line, Blair Beverly, a Manager in Google AdSense, suggested they try Lean Startup methods. He explains how he’s working to win over colleagues and management, using a counter-intuitive process to adopt the ideas.

When you run a startup, it’s easy to assume that your small team necessarily works cross-functionally, because you all talk pretty often. But when you’re trying to move quickly, and lots of projects are run by just one person, you can inadvertently skip important collaboration across roles. Cheryl Contee, CEO at Fission Strategy and co-founder of Attentive.ly, talks about how her startups bake in cross-functional collaboration from the beginning, both to improve their products and to lay the groundwork for holistic product development as they grow.

How do successful companies grow? Bob Sutton, author of “Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less,” has done deep research in start-ups, pharmaceuticals, airlines, retail, financial services, high-tech, education, non-profits, government, and healthcare, and he’ll talk with Eric Ries about what it takes to scale up quickly and effectively.

Team leaders from Brant Cooper’s December 9 workshop, Introducing Lean Startup in Your Corporation, share real-time conference experiment results, giving you a chance to see what evidence-based decision making looks like.

Finding product/market fit is the key to success for new ventures. But it’s often elusive, and understanding the needs and desires of your potential customers is harder than many of us expect. Christina Wodtke, of Wodtke Consulting, shares design techniques to help you glean meaningful insights about your target market.

When you have long product cycles or you’re building big physical things–or both–you typically face significant risk, as a lot can go wrong between drawing board and customers. In theory, Lean Startup methods help you reduce that risk. But it’s not always obvious how you can apply them. Cory Nelson, Sr. Executive Product Manager at GE Distributed Power, talks with Eric Ries about how GE has used Lean Startup methods to develop a new diesel engine more quickly and with less risk than it had for similar products in the past.

We all hear that we should make “data-driven” decisions in deciding what to test and how to measure results. But few of us have much experience actually doing that. With real and accessible examples, Dan McKinley walks us through the process–and the simple math–he developed to test, or scrap, new ideas at Etsy.

When you have an untested concept, it’s easy to come up with reasons to avoid customer development or ignore the qualitative feedback you’re getting. Cindy Alvarez, author of Lean Customer Development and head of product design and user research for Yammer (a Microsoft company), leads several entrepreneurs through a live problem-solving session, highlighting actionable approaches to customer development challenges.

What’s the biggest challenge in getting a team of people to adopt Lean Startup methods? Dan Milstein, founder at Hut 8 Labs, suggests a somewhat surprising answer: it’s the tendency of leaders to fall prey to the deep, built-in human propensity for self-deception. We’re wired to lie to ourselves in certain situations–and, in startups, those situations crop up all the time. Tying together psychology research and his own (painful) experiences on both sides of the leader/team member divide, Dan looks at the dangers of self-deception and what you can do to overcome it.