Ever since Eric announced Patrick and Brant's new book The Lean Entrepreneur (with illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK), we've been excited to be part of the book launch. Coming up in just a few short months, you'll have a chance to go in-depth with the authors and their book at an awesome workshop.
As we’ve mentioned here once or ten
times before, this year, The
Lean Startup Conference will include a second day, December
4, with in-demand
workshops from established leaders in our
community. Gold
and Platinum Passes get you into the workshops, and
we’ve conducted a series of short interviews with the workshop leaders to help
you better understand how they think and what they’re offering.
If you follow Lean Startup
experts, you’ve probably come across Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits, co-authors
of The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development and The Lean
Entrepreneur,
and leaders
of our workshop “The Lean Entrepreneur: Embrace the Unknown to Go Big.” Patrick recently
answered a few questions for us.
What aspect of Lean
Startup methods most inspires you?
Patrick: The most
powerful Lean Startup concept may be the embracing of "I don't know."
So instead of believing in what we call The Myth of the Visionary, wherein a
successful entrepreneur is someone who has seen the future with a fully formed,
crystallized product in his or her head and so then locks themselves in a
garage until product launch, upon which they achieve overnight success, the
Lean Startup teaches entrepreneurs to recognize what they don't actually know,
and then how to learn what value they can create, for whom, and how to market,
sell and deliver that value. This learning comes from interacting with
customers, running experiments, and using data to help inform decisions. The Lean
Startup methodology embraces the unknown, the uncertainty of the market, and
teaches entrepreneurs to use small failures to achieve big successes.
What makes it
hard for companies to implement this process?
Patrick: It depends on
the stage of the business. Big businesses need a way to develop an internal
ecosystem for rapid experimentation on truly innovative product ideas. But they
get stuck when measuring new endeavors against existing, core-business metrics.
Combining Horizon Planning with Lean Startup is a path out of this dilemma.
Startups
with some amount of traction tend to think they're "done" with Lean
Startup. But often they quickly find themselves on another plateau that
threatens the business. Where are new customers going to come from? Are we
building the right features and products? How do we scale? If properly understood
and implemented, you're never done with Lean Startup. As aspects of your business
model become known, you transition some activities to full-bore execution, but
you must continue to perform learning and improvement activities to scale and
win.
Early-stage
startups are taught to believe in the vision. Vision is important, but just as
important is understanding that the market is the final arbiter, and what is
not known will be a greater part of the success or failure than what is known.
So it's vitally important for entrepreneurs to have an iterative,
experimenting, data-informed process for transforming the unknown to known, for
discovering and validating the value being created.
What will people
take away from your workshop?
Patrick: Market
uncertainty can be described by an innovation spectrum stretching from lesser
market uncertainty when undertaking sustaining innovation to greater market
uncertainty when pursuing truly disruptive innovation. Whether you’re in a
startup or in the enterprise, where you sit on the innovation spectrum
determines how you will apply Lean Startup methods. In this session, people
will learn to determine where they fit on the spectrum to help determine
strategy and tactics for the future. They’ll also learn about the Value Stream
and what waste looks like in a Lean Startup; the Anti-Segment (those people you
don’t want to listen to) and how to segment your market so you’re not trying to
be all things to all people. Attendees will leave knowing the value they’re
creating, for whom, and how to deliver that value.
This video features Cooper and Vlaskovits speaking at UC Irvine about Lean Startup.
If you’re thinking about registering for The
Lean Startup Conference, bear in mind that space for the workshops is limited,
and that we have a block of early-bird tickets
on sale right now. When this block sells out, the price goes up. Register now
for a Gold or
Platinum Pass to attend the workshops!
