Tag Archives: lean startup

Continuous innovation with Lean Startup – Seminar on 25 April ’13

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Our aim for this session was to give a perspective on The Lean Startup(*) coming from our background in Agile product development. Indeed in our experience with agile projects, all too often the feedback loop is not completely closed with the end users and the team relies on “proxys” to identify requirements and collect feedback. Still, this works reasonably well when for instance the customer is internal to the organisation and close to the development team. However in a situation of extreme uncertainty (new business, new market, unknown customer…) this is not sufficient to help a Product Owner validate his vision and decide what should be built next.

The Lean Startup is a complement approach, and a whole entrepreurial movement, that fills this gap and helps you be innovative, avoid waste and build & launch successful products.

The following presentation is the outline of the seminar we hosted on 25 April 2013:

The game that we played during the session, which will be described in a separate post, was really a nice way for the participants to play both customer and entrepreneur roles, and to experience a few key aspects such as:

  • The positive attitude of our first customers and their indulgence about early product imperfections.
  • The feasibility of quickly testing key assumptions without building a complete product.
  • The importance of early customer feedback to build a viable product strategy.

Hopefully, while we could not to provide a complete overview of the approach developed by Eric Ries (in particular Innovation Accounting), we were able to explore with the audience how we can be inspired by the Lean Startup principles to avoid waste in our projects, especially by considering the requirements specifications as hypothesis rather than absolute truth.

The Lean Startup Book * The Lean Startup is a trademark and service mark owned by Eric Ries.

Agile Partner sponsor of the successful first Startup Weekend Luxembourg

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Agile Partner is proud to have sponsored the first Luxembourg Startup Weekend, on 16-18 November 2012, together with Technoport and Microsoft amongst others.

This was a major event for the local entrepreneurial community that attracted more than 70 startup enthusiasts who worked hard and had fun during 54 hours to develop their new business ideas. They were supported by 16 highly skilled coaches & judges, seasoned entrepreneurs and investors, who gave their valuable insight.

We have received great feedback about the initiative itself and the organization. But the many different backgrounds, profiles, origins, and experiences of participants themselves was a key success factor.

An award was given to Bookics thanks to an original idea. The concept aims to allow doctors and patients understand each other even if they don’t speak the same language.

The second major output of this weekend was about Learning. All the teams experienced a lot about how to create a profitable business model from their original idea and how to start implementing it using tools and methods such as the Business Model Canvas, Lean Customer Development and Scrum.

From our perspective this is an indispensable skill to develop a viable vision. Our experience shows that this is the required starting point for any successful product development and that Lean/Agile approaches offer a strong framework for testing this vision and adapting the product to match customers’ real needs. This is what we help our customers do, not only in startups but also in established organizations.

The next Startup Weekend Luxembourg will be organized in 2013 and Agile Partner will be there again. We welcome all new future participants to connect with us for preparing it.

For more information:

http://luxembourg.startupweekend.org

About Lean/Agile product development and how we can help you create a highly successful product, contact us contact@agilepartner.net.

An undercover agilist in a Startup Weekend

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Logo Startup Weekend LyonRecently (13-15 April 2012) my colleague Yann and I participated in our first Startup Weekend in Lyon (France). We had multiple objectives when going there, including having fun, preparing for organizing a similar Startup Weekend in Luxembourg later this year, pitching some of our startup ideas and evaluating the spread of Agile concepts and practices amongst the community of entrepreneurs. In this post I would like to share some insights about the later aspect.

As agile practitioners we already know that Scrum in particular is very well suited for new product development and we have actually seen the benefits of Agile for such projects in both new companies and mature organizations. But Yann had the occasion a few weeks ago to discuss with a startup team that was using Scrum with only partial knowledge and understanding of the rationales behind it, hence limited benefits. So I wanted to see on the field to what extent Agile methods are understood and used by innovative teams and entrepreneurs. A Startup Weekend would be an ideal Lab for such an observation.

I had a first try on Friday evening by pitching my idea of a starter kit for new agile teams (more about this soon). I quickly realized that this was far from most participants’ knowledge area and concerns. My pitch was not a winner and I was wondering if anyone in the room had ever heard of Agile.

When I eventually joined a team, I did not want to be too pushy for Agile, but rather to see how the team would become more familiar with agile along the weekend. Actually, when discussing with other participants it appeared that some of them are already practicing some sort of Agile process, but only a few of them know what Agile and Scrum actually are.

One of the key aspects of Startup Weekends is the participation of tech and startup leaders as coaches (the “mentors”). Some of those “mentors” were the first to bring Agile explicitly on the table, as a proper framework for managing the kind of innovative product/service development projects that we were at during that weekend.

What stroke me in the team I joined was the high number of hypotheses that were taken without a structured approach to test and validate those assumptions. I believe that several mentors participated in initiating a feedback loop with the team so that we could learn and pivot from the original ideas in order to create a more appealing value proposition and business model (Yann’s team actually pivoted multiple times and quite often all along the weekend ;-) . I did not hear anyone refer to the Lean Startup movement boosted by Eric Ries’ book, but a lot of discussions were really in line with it.

At the end of the weekend, the 15 teams that were formed to work on selected ideas (selected out of 42 initial ideas pitched on Friday evening) presented their projects to a jury composed of entrepreneurs and other personalities. While the evaluation criteria were intentionally kept “secret” it appeared clearly that the jury expected to be thrilled by a great vision backed by a few hard facts & figures, rather than a full 3-years business plan. I felt a strong agile mindset in this moment when it was clearly recognised that faced with so much uncertainty, it was vital to create a learning organization that aims at a great goal, to inspect and adapt continuously along the way, instead of building a full-fledged plan based on pure guesses.

My last comment is that all 3 winning teams were not only able to present an exciting business idea but also to demonstrate tangible results (e.g. a domain name and an embryo of web application), which for me shows once again the importance of demonstrating your actual progress to build trust with your customers / investors, another key Agile concept!