Presented by Vladimir Blagojevic and Nick Boucart

Abstract:

Waterfall (kind of) worked when both solution and the problem were known. Agile provides an answer when the solution isn’t known, and teaches us to iterate instead of specifying everything upfront.

But what if both solution and problem are unknown? Welcome to the world of startups and new product development. Most startups don’t fail because they fail to make a product, but rather that they build products only a few people want to use and pay for. What startups often fail to do is to iterate on the problem as well as iterating on the solution.

This is changing. An increasing number of startups and new ventures recognize this issue, and are using Customer Development (Steve Blank) and Lean Startup (Eric Ries) methodologies and techniques to validate their ideas as early and cheaply as possible. They teach us how to set up a learning organization that will search for a viable business model.

• Customer development treats entrepreneur’s product vision as a set of guesses (called hypotheses): guesses about customers, their problems, about the business model… So the first step is to identify and test these hypotheses, initially through a series of carefully designed interviews. You shift your focus from execution (development, sales…) to learning.
• Lean Startup further builds on this and teaches us how to set an organization built for learning (by linking Customer Development and Agile development). It uses actionable metrics (based on measuring what users are actually doing with your product) to further validate our assumptions once the product is deployed. Example lean startup techniques include: continuous deployment (followed by measuring users’ acceptance of changes), A/B testing (e.g. exposing half of the users to a newly deployed feature/change and the other half not, and comparing the effects), pivoting (iterating on the product vision), minimum viable product etc.

This session will introduce common startup problems, and principles behind Customer Development and Lean Startups. You’ll get some first hands-on experience in a simulation. We’ll end by giving you some Lean Startup techniques illustrated by real-life examples.

We have hands-on experience of applying these methodologies ourselves and with our clients.

Format and length

60 minutes interactive tutorial

Intended audience and prerequisites:

This session is primarily intended for anyone either working on a completely new product (idea), or with an ambition to become an entrepreneur (or intrapreneur). Some of these techniques could as well be used when introducing a new release of an existing product.

Objective(s) of the session:

• Help you understand why many startups and new product developments fail
• Introduce you to basics of Customer Development and Lean Startups, two related methodologies that help founders validate their ideas before investing their life savings
• Encourage you to pursue your dreams! :-)

Benefits for participants and presenter(s):

• Understand why many startups and new product developments fail and what you can do to prevent it
• Learn hands on techniques that help founders validate their ideas before investing their life savings
• Hear about concrete cases from our first-hand experience