Lean Startup

You know that gathering customer feedback is critical to building a successful product or service. But how do you find potential customers to interview? And how do you ensure that your limited time with them will lead to meaningful insights that help you reach product/market fit? Intercom founder Des Traynor explains how to find the right customers, ask the right questions, and avoid common mistakes.

In 2012, social-impact consultant Ellynita Lamin launched a recovery program in a war-torn, economically depressed area of Indonesia. Early in the project, she realized that her own biases were preventing her from measuring progress accurately. She explains the steps she took to truly understand the community’s needs and focus on the right metrics.

When you’re building a new product, you have to experiment quickly and change constantly. If your product is digital, and you have a technical infrastructure that isn’t built to deal with these conditions, it can stonewall any kind of innovation. In this talk for technical team members, Codeship co-founder Florian Motlik introduces different ways to build your infrastructure and processes for constant change, experimentation and innovation.

It’s deceptively easy to test the wrong aspect of your business, wasting time and money while you head down the wrong path. Rather than test the wrong hypotheses or an inappropriate risk for your stage of product development, learn from Grace Ng, co-founder at QuickMVP, as she lays out road-tested tactics for truly effective experiment design.

Experimentation can generate important insights, but it can also bury you under an avalanche of irrelevant data. Hiten Shah, founder at KISSmetrics, shares key tips and plenty of real-world examples for structuring A/B tests to ensure that you derive useful data every single time you run them.

Your team is committed to customer development and conducting user research, but how do you integrate the information you collect into your product development? Hudl Product Manager Greg Nelson explains how his company ensures that the entire, cross-functional product team understands and can act on customers’ needs.

Every business leader knows that, in theory, good ideas can–and should–come from anywhere in your organization. But in reality, the voices of introverts and people far-removed from decision makers often go unheard. Hugh Molotsi, Vice President of the Intuit Labs Incubator and self-proclaimed introvert, talks about how Lean Startup methods at Intuit have helped surface game-changing ideas from quiet employees, front-line staff and unexpected corners of the organization.

You understand the importance of engaging directly with your customers as you develop products for them. But what happens when your user base is very far away? User experience consultant Holly DeWolf shares practical, cost-effective techniques for overcoming distance challenges and engaging with lots of customers remotely.

Leaders often focus on becoming better communicators and speakers. But becoming better listeners may be more important in running profitable companies. In this talk, Jana Eggers–consultant, former CEO at Spreadshirt, and former General Manager of Intuit Quickbase–teaches actionable tips for becoming a better listener and and thus ensuring that your customer development thus has a much deeper impact.

In heavily regulated industries, compliance is non-negotiable, and for many product teams, governance can be a deterrent for launching experiments. Is it possible to balance innovation with compliance? Joanne Molesky, principal consultant at ThoughtWorks, answers this question with key lessons learned from her experience in the IT industry.