The
Lean Startup
Conference

Validated Learning is hard to get: bad research gives you bad data, the wrong metrics will set you off in the wrong direction, and well-meaning customers have a habit of lying about their behavior. In this full-day workshop, you’ll get practical, hands-on experience with useful techniques for getting and using customer feedback. This workshop has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs around the world improve their validated learning results—including students at Singularity University, 500Startups, and the United States Presidential Innovation Fellows program. 

The workshop will teach you how to conduct the right kind of customer interviews and will dive deep into prioritizing high-risk assumptions, designing experiments, and measuring the effectiveness of your product (not your marketing!).

• In the Morning, you will learn: 
• How to get useful feedback on your product (instead of a lot of happy talk)
• Why research participants lie to you so often
• When to “Shut The Hell Up!” in customer research sessions
• How to get product insight and customer insight packed into one research session
• Why Laura Klein is the hottest research blogger in the Lean Startup universe
  

In the Afternoon, you will learn:

• How to decide which assumptions you absolutely MUST test
• What the right size is for an experiment
• Why marketing metrics won’t help you make a better product
• 4 Power Tools of Lean Startup teams
• 7 Habits of Highly Effective validators

Market uncertainty can be described by an innovation spectrum stretching from lesser uncertainty when you’re undertaking projects that build directly on others to greater uncertainty when you’re pursuing truly disruptive ideas. Where is your idea on the innovation spectrum? Whether you are in a startup or in the enterprise, where you sit on the spectrum determines how you can most profitably apply lean startup methods. In this workshop, you’ll learn:

• The best strategy and tactics for your place on the innovation spectrum
• What waste looks like in a lean startup and how to capture the value stream
• How to ignore anti-segment and how to segment your market expertly
• The difference between listening to customers and doing what they say
• How to build a cross-functional team for Day 0

You’ll leave knowing:

• The value you are creating
• For whom and
• How to deliver that value

What you won’t get is: a paint-by-numbers approach for instant success; a 400-page workbook; or time wasted listening to pie-in-the-sky theories of entrepreneurial success.

With the diverse demands of clients, bosses, engineers, and designers, web application design has reached a new level of frenzy and discord. But with a collaborative mindset and the proper process in place, design and engineering teams can work together and launch your newest mobile or web-based app successfully. What’s the secret sauce? In this session, you’ll step through the application development process with a leader who has refined the process to an art form. Learn behind-​​the-​​scenes techniques for rapid prototyping, and find out how to enhance your current process to include iterative usability testing cycles.

Lean startup methodolgies transformed how we build companies. Now lean analytics shows you how to use data to build better companies faster. In this information-packed workshop, you’ll learn how to use analytics to find product/market fit before your money runs out.

You’ll come away with techniques for:

• Putting data to work in a startup
• Understanding the long funnel from awareness to engagement
• Finding the One Metric That Matters
• Applying analytics at every stage of the business, from need discovery through to exit

Lean Startup techniques have tremendous promise—and have delivered tremendous value—in the enterprise. But applying these techniques inside large organizations means grappling with obstacles that small firms never encounter. From functional silos to risk-averse managers, from compliance officers to global markets, practitioners who have tried to make headway can find frustration at every turn.

In this workshop, Giff Constable, Jeff Gothelf, and Josh Seiden—plus special guests—will present case studies, discuss lessons learned, and lead a lively round table discussion that will further your understanding of Lean Startup in enterprise environments and provide concrete advice you can apply to the challenges you face in your organizations. Bring your success stories and your lessons learned; bring your questions and ideas. Experienced practitioners and newcomers welcome.

All companies, even those that take a lean approach, face these problems in B2B sales:

• You can’t get potential customers to call back
• They won’t make a decision
• They seem to like a ever-ending beta, but they will not buy
• Your deals stall

This interactive workshop will help you learn from these problems by using conscious planning and experimentation. Traditional sales training stresses “every no moves you closer to a yes.” Our approach to engineering your sales process says instead, “What looks like noise is often actually data.” Designing and debugging a repeatable sales process is key to a sustainable business, and we’ll address how to diagnose common problems to determine likely root causes. You will leave with a scientific approach to understanding your customers' needs and their buying process so that you can scale your business in harmony with it.