How to Get Your Coworkers to Care About User Research

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.

If you build products or services, then having empathy for your users is part of your job. Good news: If you build products or services, then we have empathy for you. We talked with Laura Klein, a preeminent expert on user experience, about the questions she gets asked most often by other product pros. Laura is not only the author of UX for Lean Startup and the creator of the design blog Users Know, she’s also Head of Product at Hint Health, a software company working on healthcare affordability, and one of our most popular speakers. At this year’s Lean Startup Conference, she’s running a hands-on session teaching you how to validate your assumptions, explained below (the conference runs December 8 - 12 in San Francisco, and you can register here to attend in person or via livestream).

Lisa Regan: So what are some of the questions people most often ask you, and what advice do you give?

Laura Klein: Here’s one question that I’m going to share with you not because it's the most important one, but because it is the one that I get asked, I think, in every single talk I ever give that has anything to do with research. The question is, "How do I get people at my company to understand that what I do is important? How do I get them to see the value of User Experience research or design?"

The answer that I used to give, which I think was not very helpful but was how I felt, was, "Quit and join someplace that actually understands what you do, because they're going to win in the end anyway.” But I think the right answer--assuming that first answer is not an option or that you just enjoy tilting at windmills--is to find a way to treat the other people at your company as themselves being users of your research. Just as you would with a customer, you need to understand their needs better.

First, you need to find a way to have them experience what their customers are actually going through. Often, a good way to do this is with video. So you would just go ahead and do that user research yourself, figuring out a fast way that you, on your own, can capture that information and then share those little snippets with the people that you need to convince. Nothing is more impactful than actually seeing what you are putting your customers through. Because it's very easy to ignore that or not fully accept that there are problems with your product, but seeing person after person after person struggle with the same thing is incredibly impactful. So that’s an excellent way of doing it.

But I think that another thing to do is to understand why they don't care about this. Is it because they don't understand the value of it? In which case something like showing a video of people struggling with the product, and then showing video of people not struggling with it after it's been fixed, can be incredibly helpful. Is it because they've had a bad experience in the past with research? I think then the answer is to help them understand ways to do research or design that aren't what they've experienced in the past. Maybe they worked with a really big agency that charged them a huge amount of money and gave them really crappy results. I've run into this. Maybe they're just like, "We don't have time for this." I hear this all the time, "We don't have time for research." At that point, you really have to explain to them that they don't have time to not do research--because it takes a lot longer to fix it later than it does to fix it before it's built.

LR: Do you think people just don't want to hear what they already know to be true?

LK: There's also that, and I think this happens a lot, honestly. This happens whenever people are rushing to get new features out, and they're ignoring the old product. There's, "We already know about the product problem. We already know about that. We've heard about that." At that point, you really actually need to show them the impact that the bug is having on their bottom line. In that case, metrics and analytics are really important. "Hey, look, look at the funnel. You're spending all this money to get people into the product, and they're all dropping out here, and we've identified why they're all dropping out here. This problem that you've been ignoring for a year, that I know you are totally used to, is costing you X amount of money or X number of users. This is a quantifiable problem.” If they're real numbers-driven people, then that's a good way of getting to them.

But again, I think the way to figure out how to change people's minds within your organization is to understand them better. User experience people, we are trained to have empathy, or at least try to fake it, but we can understand. That is always our goal. We need to understand our users, and we need to understand our own problems. Apply that within your company, apply that to your engineers. I'm a big advocate for having empathy for your engineers. Understand what their needs are in terms of what you're delivering to them, and they will be much better about implementing the things that you're asking for. Understand and have empathy for your managers. Understand what they're getting judged on and what their role in the organization is, and understand how to make them better at their jobs, and they will be much better about helping you do what you need to do.

This seems a little bit off the topic, but it's around this concept of, how do I convince people that what I'm doing is important? I think the answer is that you give them not more deliverables or not more exact deliverables, but you understand what they need to see from you, and you deliver that. That's a very user experience way of looking at things.

LR: What's something that the product team would need to see? What's an example of what that would look like?

LK: I just joined the team I’m working with as Head of Product a couple of months ago, and I've been working very closely with the engineering team. In fact, I have to tell them what to build, because part of the Head of Product's job is to be sure that they're building the right things. So the first thing that I did when I came in and sat down with them was I looked at how they're currently working and I basically asked them, "What do you need from me to be successful?"

To get an answer to that, I would show them different levels of deliverables. For example, I would show them various works in progress. The last thing that I'm ever going to deliver to an engineering department is a pixel-perfect set of Photoshop mock-ups and just be like, "Here, implement this exactly." That's pretty much never the right thing. So I was like, "What level do you guys want to work at?" I would show them, "Here's a task flow of when something happens. Then here's some human-readable user stories that document everything that could possibly happen in this situation, and here's a sketch with some notes on the side. Which of these--or is it some combination of these--will help you when you're sitting down and writing the code? Also, by the way, I'm standing right here. I'm not away at a desk. I'm right here, a foot away. Literally turn around, tap me on the shoulder, and ask me a question.”

What we ended up with is that we use some combination of all of these kinds of things, including interactive prototypes sometimes, sometimes sketches with annotations, and sometimes test flows, and sometimes user stories, and sometimes sitting down and working through an error case together. We use a combination of all of these things to produce the different features. Depending on the feature, they get something different. Because it depends on if it's a little thing, or a big thing, or a very complicated human interaction. They don’t just get the deliverable that I want to give them. It's never that. They get the thing that they need in order to move forward and be successful on the first try.

The funny thing is that, with my team, I haven't had you resort to showing them videos of the users. I probably won't have to do that, because they are incredibly empathetic, and they see all the customer service emails that come in. They care deeply about the users already. So, I don't have to convince them that users are important. But I think in a lot of engineering teams--not mine luckily--but in a lot of engineering teams, especially at big companies, they can feel very removed from what the customer actually wants. So the design deliverables that you give them have to be quite explicit, because they are not necessarily going to have the framework for making good decisions about the user on their own. The right approach to that is to help them get closer to the user, because if they understand the user's needs they will make better decisions on their own, because they will make them by thinking about the user. So I figure out what deliverables I can give them that will be the most useful will help them to make the right decisions.

LR: So that was one question that actually breaks out into two approaches. What else do people ask you?

LK: I get asked the difference between UX and UI a lot, and I see a lot of explanations of this online. Again, UI--user interface--is a subset of user experience design. I really like to think of UX as the umbrella for all of this stuff. But the UI is very much more about the layout and the heuristics and the visual design. It's about the flow. Are you going to give people one big screen, or are you going to give them three screens where they do something different on each one, or are you going to give them a walkthrough, or are you going to point out important things, or are you going to hide things from them until they become more involved?

If you're a Twitter user, is your first experience with Twitter just seeing a random list of tweets, or is it picking from a bunch of different topics that you're interested in, or is it finding your friends? What is Twitter about in that onboarding experience? How does that work? That's a crossover of UX and UI, and they definitely impact one another. I think that too many people focus too much on the UI part. They focus too much on the visual and the pretty, and just the layout of the screen, and they don't focus enough on what's the context in which the user is using this product? What's the flow? Where did the users come from? Who are these people? What are their needs? What is the reason that they are using your product, and what is the fastest way that you can fulfill that need for them?

Nobody ever says, "I want to use this product." Nobody's ever like, "I want to use a power drill," unless they just bought a power drill, and they might be like, "Let's see what I could use a drill for." But in general an owner of a power drill very rarely goes, "What can I drill a hole in today?" They have to put up a bookshelf, or put together a piece of IKEA furniture. They think, "You know what, I should totally get my power drill, because that's going to help me put together this furniture." So, what's the fastest way that you can get that bookshelf built? What's the fastest way that you could fill the need that prompted someone to use your product?

That's the context of the user, and that is very much about the user experience. Yeah, having a bad UI on a power drill is really dangerous, and it can totally prevent the user from fulfilling their need. But you can have a great UI that actually has a bad user experience. Because it can be a beautiful, really well laid-out, really nice-looking page that just doesn't fulfill a need for anybody or that dead-ends people. Or, where people are like, "This is beautiful. I don't know what to do." It's not that one is more important than the other; it's that one actually is just a part of the other. The UI is part of the general UX, and so I'm just getting very tired of people coming and saying, "We need a user experience designer, because our pages aren't pretty enough" or, "because things are laid very badly" or whatever. It's like, "That's a small portion of your problem."

I might look at something and go, "It's not the problem that your product page is laid out wrong; it's that when somebody puts something in their cart, they actually can't make it through to checkout because the checkout flow is really confusing, and it has all of these dead ends," or, "because if you go through the checkout flow, and then you jump out to get a new product, something bad happens." There's what I always call the "happy day flow" or the "sunny day flow." A sunny day flow is: I come to the product, I find something I love. I put it into my cart, I go through the checkout process, I put in my credit card number, and I buy it.

In the real-life flow for a lot of people, it's more like: I put something into the cart, I realize, "No I'd actually don't need that; I need something else." So I go back and get something and try to take the other thing out of my cart. I try to get two of this new thing. Then I go through, and I realize I don't have my credit card, I want to pay with Paypal, but then I realize it's a gift. Then I go back and I try to change the gift options and ship it to someplace else and suddenly, I'm lost. That's not just the user interface, that’s the user experience.

LR: Is the problem that the people designing the flow don't know that's how people behave? Or is the problem that they find it technically difficult to find solutions to all of these contingencies?

LK: Certainly it is much harder to design for the second thing. But realistically, I think one of the reasons that this happens is because lot of designers think from the screen. "Does this screen allow people to put their credit card information in?" "Yes." "Great, it's done." But they're not thinking about the actual user experience; they're not thinking through the whole list of human stories that could happen. They're not actually being user-centered. They're thinking, "What can I allow my user to do?" Don't allow your user to do anything. Show them what they're supposed to do. Help them do the thing that they want to do and that you want them to do. Understand that there will be problems as they do it, and that your design has to comfortably accommodate all of those edge cases to a certain extent.

LR: Talk about the relationship between edge cases and MVPs.

LK: A lot of times people ask me about MVP: “How do I know if my MVP is big enough?” The answer to that is, "Can you learn something from it?" Not just anything--we can all learn something from everything. But, can you learn the thing that you wanted to learn from it, specifically? The truth is that MVPs should solve very hard problems, but they should really only solve one problem. Like if you are a startup and you've got your first product, it should solve a serious problem. But it should solve one serious problem for one specific person.

If you're trying to solve a bunch of problems for a bunch of different people, you have increased the complexity of your product to the extent that you're going to run into that thing that I talked about before. You're going to run into all these edge cases and corner cases and, "What if they do this? What if they do that?" The more contained the problem that you're solving, the easier it is to account for all of those cases. So that you don’t get somebody who comes in with the right problem and they want to use your solution, but they have a really shitty experience doing it.

If you're building a product that allows people to buy something, maybe the first iteration of that, so that you can avoid all of that cart stuff, maybe the first iteration of that is that they come in, and they click a button, and they can buy one of those things. What you're trying to learn from that is: Are people interested in buying this particular thing? That's what you're trying to learn. They can come in and they can buy that thing, and maybe you store their payment information, so if they want to buy another one they can click the buy button again, and it will just buy it for them.

Maybe you avoid all of that business of put it in your cart, take it out of your cart, put it on your wishlist, buy something on your wishlist. Avoid that for now. You don't have to do that first. If what you are trying to learn is, do people want to buy this thing that I am selling, then make it as easy as possible for them to come in and buy that thing that you are selling. Don't necessarily make it possible for them to come in and do all of this other things with it. When Amazon started out, you could go in and you could buy a book. I shopped on the original Amazon. You could search for a book, you could pick a book and you could buy a book. That was it. It's gotten a little bigger since then.

Just because I'm talking about building a very small thing that only does one thing, it does not mean you're going to launch that to the entire world. The entire world is not going to look at it and go, "It only does one thing; I’m not interested." You're going to show it to a small number of people. You're going to get feedback. You're going to iterate. You're probably going to hear the same thing, "Why doesn't it have a wishlist?” That’s fine. You're not worried about that yet. You're worried about getting the interaction of this one thing correct. Then you could add in the other things. Adding in the other things later really helps you to manage the complexity of the design.

LR: It sounds simple, but let's say you're not doing a shopping cart-driven business. How do you know which complexities of your model you can just set aside for now?
LK: At that point, it's all about early user research and customer development. You have to know really, really clearly what problem you're solving, and for whom you are solving it. The kinds of problems that you are looking to solve in an early early, early product are not things like, "I would like to reduce energy usage among US households." Too big. "I would like to save time for moms." Too big. That is not a specific, addressable problem for an individual human being that you can identify. Moms are not an early adopter group. Some moms are, but there are too many of them. Mine is not like yours. That's not a persona; that's not a group I can define for. They have too many very different types of problems, depending on who they are, where they are, and what they like, dislike, and what technology they're using, what their jobs are.

By narrowing it down to a very specific small user group with a very specific problem, you will be able to narrow down that initial product or that MVP to something very specific. Facebook always is the good example of this. It started for Harvard students to look at pictures of other students. That's what it did; that was the whole thing. They didn't start out being whatever the hell they are now--an advertising platform and a gaming platform and a way to keep in touch with everybody you've ever met and a way to follow celebrities. No. None of that. Harvard students looking at pictures of other Harvard students. You don't have to start big to get big.

LR: So interestingly, the best thing to do for improving your user interface is to strip a bunch of stuff off your website?

LK: I honestly think that's why the whole mobile-first thing is so popular, because all mobile-first really means, if you really look at the design ethos behind mobile-first, the reason people go mobile-first is because mobile forces you to make every screen about something very specific. You can't add shit into a mobile interface. You have five inches; make the most of it. That means every single interface, every single thing is about one cold action. It's about one message, at least the successful ones. You could take a picture and you could post a picture, and it's got to go in that order. Those are the successful ones-–that every single screen is about solving a very specific problem within the user experience. It's not about allowing people to do whatever they want; it's about showing people what to do to be successful.

I think there's a really nice method for doing this, which is imagine your successful customer. Don't just imagine them, use metrics to figure out who they are. What have you helped them become? If you're doing tax preparation software, your successful user has successfully filed their taxes without tearing their hair out. Maybe you've been able to show them that they've saved a certain amount of money by doing it. How do you get them from the person who thinks, "Shit, I need to file my taxes," to the person who has filed their taxes? You have to start from imagining who your successful, happy user is. Then you can tell them how to get there. You don't let them get there; you help them get there. You show them the path.

You start even before you have a product. You talk to the people who had the problem that you think you're solving. You understand what they've tried to do to solve it in the past. This is actually a question that I get a lot, which is, "How do you figure out what the user’s needs actually are?" You reach out to people who you think will have this problem, and you have conversations with them. You don't pitch them your solution; you just have conversations with them about their problem. You see what other things they have tried, because here's the thing. If they've got a problem and they have tried in the past to solve it and they have failed, they are a great market. Much easier to sell into that market, where people already know that they want your product.

Then you go back to them afterwards and you see how they're doing with your stuff. You also go back to the people who have tried your stuff and given it up to understand what promise you didn't fulfill to them. "Why did you try this product? What were you hoping to get? What did it did not do for you? Why did you stop using it?"

If you talk to five people who are really similar to one another, you should start to see patterns. If you do not start to see patterns, then you may need to narrow down the type of people you're talking to. There is another question I hear a lot, "How many people do I need to talk to learn something?" Well, you need to talk to enough people to where you're seeing patterns. If you are not seeing patterns within about five people, you are talking to too broad a group. Again, you may be going out talking to moms. Don't talk to moms.

One way to narrow the people you’re talking to is to use screeners. These are surveys that actually help you recruit for user research people that you think would like your product. You can write your own screener, or you can hire a recruiting agency that will go out and find people in very specific groups. But you're trying to identify the people that you think are going to use your product. You write the screeners in such a way that you're asking about behavioral things. You're not asking them necessarily about things that are directly related to product design. And you're not looking for just like 35- to 45-year-old men who smoke and read GQ.

Again, if you're making tax preparation software for accountants you might ask what their job was. You're only going to pick the ones who are accountants. But it may be that you think that your market is accountants who do taxes for a lot of small businesses, maybe even in a particular industry. That might be accountants who handle the taxes for restaurants. That's a market that you can imagine. You would go out and write a screener that would help you recruit people like that. You would try to weed out all the people who didn't do taxes for restaurants or who only did taxes for big companies or who worked in-house at big companies or whatever.

So then you get five of those people, and you do interviews with them about their needs, their problems, or maybe you show them your product and you see if it solves a problem for them. If you can record ten of those talks and do the same interview with them and hear the same significant problem from nine of them and it's a problem you could solve, that's excellent confirmation that you're onto something. That's a pattern. Like, if they all have a problem with getting the restaurants to file quarterlies on time or whatever. If you start to see that pattern, that is a problem that is worth solving. Especially if it is a pattern where they are like, "Urgh, I have this terrible problem. I've tried to solve in at least three ways, I've paid for solutions, they never worked. I'm just doing it all on Excel, because it's super hard. It's really manual." That is worth solving.

LR: Is there something nobody ever asks you, that you think, "People ought to ask me this," or, "People should want to know this, and yet they don’t ask”?
LK: People often ask UX questions in the wrong way. In general, the questions that people ask about UX are too broad. They're like, "How do I user research?" Not, "How do I learn this specific thing about this particular user?" If you asked me how to do user research, I would launch into, as you saw, a lot of talk about needing to figure out who your user is and what you’re going to learn, and so on. But once you've gotten there, if can come to me with, "I have this particular question that I want to learn about this person, and it's very specific. How do I do that?" that’s framing things in a much more specific way. And that’s also telling you that, if can frame things in a more specific way, you've arrived somewhere more detailed.

LR: One last question: What are you going to speak on at this year’s Lean Startup Conference?
LK: I'm doing my talk on validating assumptions in order to build better products. This idea is really core to Lean Startup. My approach is very hands-on, teaching people a particular skill and a method for figuring out what assumptions they are making when they are deciding to build a product.

What I’ve found is that if you make the wrong assumption too early, you then build a lot of things on that assumption, and it's like building your house on quicksand. I see an awful lot that people go into building a product and they specifically make assumptions like, "Well, I just assume that people have this problem that I'm solving." It turns out that if they don't, or not enough people have it, or if it's the wrong people who have it and it's not the people that you're going after, then this thing that might have been really easy to correct before you build a product becomes really hard to fix. So, that's what I'm talking about: how to identify those things and how to think about them, and I actually have a test people can take.

LR: I love a test! Ok, so you’re going to be speaking on validating assumptions, but much of your work is in UX. It sounds like your talk is going to be more broadly Lean Startup?

LK: So, here’s how I think about it. I've done a lot of dance in my life, and I know a whole bunch of different types of dance. I was talking to a dance teacher about different styles, and she was like, "At some point, after you know a bunch of different styles and you're just used to it, it's all just dancing.” There is no Lindy, or salsa, or even ballet. It's all just dancing.

This is how I'm starting to think about product: it's all just product. To me, it's all just the user experience, because the user experience to me covers literally everything. The user experience is the user's entire interaction with your product and company. If you think about something like Uber--however you feel about Uber--the experience of being in an Uber is not just the Uber app, and it's not just the rider. It's also the driver, and it's also the service of the cab company you’re not using. There's a whole experience with the company. There's the time in the car. There's the time waiting for their car. There's the time when you get the email afterwards telling you how much the car cost. There's figuring out who's paying for it. Really, there's this entire experience that exists around what a lot of people consider to be the product. But, what's the product there? I stopped thinking about it as, "There's product and there's user experience and there is customer experience.” It's all just user experience.

--

Laura has a very useful PDF available for $10, "How To Recruit Participants For User Research/UX Tests." To learn from Laura and many other great speakers at The Lean Startup Conference, register today to attend in person or via livestream.

Learn Online This Fall

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.

Boost your entrepreneurship skills without getting out of the building this fall. With an online course from Stanford and a series of webcasts from the Lean Startup Conference team, you can learn a lot from your desk in the coming months.  

First up: We’re excited to announce that Bob Sutton is joining as a speaker at this year’s Lean Startup Conference. Perhaps best known for his book, The No Asshole Rule, Bob was a terrifically popular speaker at Office Optional, and he’s written a number of best-selling business books. His latest, Scaling Up Excellence, addresses a theme of this year’s conference: How do successful companies grow?

Bob and his co-author, Huggy Rao, are hosting a free online class this fall, Scaling Up Your Venture Without Screwing Up. The course lasts five weeks, and the first session was a few days ago—but it was designed for viewing any time, and you can register for the class through this week. In addition to featuring entrepreneurs like Clara Shih and Michael Dearing, the course also includes a session with Ben Horowitz, another speaker we’re pleased to host at this year’s Lean Startup Conference.

In this preview of their course, Huggy talks about the anatomy, psychology, and physiology of scaling your company without screwing it up. An excerpt:

The anatomy of a scaling organization: Achieve the right level of flatness.

Most of us have a love-hate relationship with hierarchies. On the one hand, they can stifle innovation and make people feel powerless. On the other hand, power and status differences within an organization enhance collective effectiveness in many ways. Consider a failed experiment by Google's Larry Page, who got rid of all the company's middle managers and then had to reinstate the old system after trouble erupted. One hundred frustrated engineers were reporting to one overwhelmed senior executive.

The challenge is to weave complexity into a system in a way that does as much good and as little harm as possible. You could take a lesson from an innovative system adopted by Salesforce that struck a balance between placing too much accountability on the shoulders of a few senior executives and spreading accountability too thinly and evenly, as if it were peanut butter. Each of Salesforce's software teams was expected to complete a new software demo every 30 days, but every engineer was free to move to a new team without getting permission, which encouraged leaders to treat people well.

Where else can you learn online this fall? A consistent bit of feedback you gave us last year was that you wanted more webcasts. Heard. We’re lining up a series for entrepreneurs this fall, going in-depth on Lean Startup methods and applications. The first three webcasts start rolling out next week, and we’re keeping our popular format, featuring a meaty conversation between experts, followed by substantial live Q&A with attendees.

The webcasts are free, and you can register for them individually. Here's the initial lineup: 

• Lean Startup 101. September 25, 10a PT. Janice Fraser and Sarah Milstein explain the basic terms and concepts. For a lot of you, that means: Tell your friends co-workers about this one.


• What Should You Really Measure? October 2, 10a PT. Alistair Croll, Eric Ries and Danielle Morrill take an in-depth look at the hardest metrics question.


• An Introduction to Lean Impact. October 28, 10a PT. Leanne Pittsford and Sarah Milstein look at one of the most in-demand topics of last year’s Lean Startup Conference: applying Lean Startup principles in mission-driven orgs.

Next week’s webcast, Lean Startup 101, is a chance for people new to the ideas to get a leg up. Sarah and Janice will explain the terminology of Lean Startup (What’s an MVP? What’s customer development?) and how it translates into practices (Who should use innovation accounting? What’s the story with pivots?).

Sarah is Lean Startup Conference co-host and CEO of Lean Startup Productions. Janice is a leading expert in new product development with Lean Startup techniques. She’s advised hundreds of startups, including founders at companies like Task Rabbit and Lyft, and she’s trained members of the presidential administration in innovation practices. (At this year’s Lean Startup Conference, Janice will give a full-day workshop on Lean Startup 101, with hands-on exercises.)

As a preview of the webcast, here’s Janice giving a basic intro to Lean Startup, including an analogy between creating a startup and choosing a wedding cake:

We also invite you—or your coworkers who’ve wondered what all the fuss is about—to take a look at “Lean Startup 101: The Essential Ideas" an article by Sarah answering a few basic questions about Lean Startup. (As a reminder, we’ve talked before about how you can get buy-in from an organization to implement Lean Startup.)

To catch Janice and Bob in person, join us at The Lean Startup Conference, December 8 – 12 in San Francisco. Our fall sale for conference tickets is the last price break for this year, and it ends on October 31st. Now is a great time to buy, before you loose track and miss the sale price. Register today.

Last Chance for Summer Sale Prices

Post by Sarah Milstein & Eric Ries, co-hosts for The Lean Startup Conference

At this year’s Lean Startup Conference, we seek to answer the difficult questions you face as an entrepreneur. To give you a sense of how we’ll do that, we’re introducing you to three of our speakers—all of whom are appearing for the first time at The Lean Startup Conference, and all of whom have advice you can put to work today. Note that summer sale pricing for the conference ends on Monday night, so register now for the best deal possible.

Herewith, our introductions.

Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz. Frankly, Ben doesn’t need a ton of introduction. A well-known startup innovator, he’s co-founder of the leading VC firm Andreessen Horowitz and author of a new book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building A Business When There Are No Easy Answers, which brims with unusually direct, useful advice for new and seasoned entrepreneurs alike.

Among the questions we’re seeking to address at this year’s conference is: What does the culture of a high-performance, high-growth team look like? In his book and on his blog, Ben tackles that question. We particularly like this post, Hiring Executives: If You’ve Never Done the Job, How Do You Hire Somebody Good?, in which he guides new entrepreneurs of growing companies through one of the more vexing challenges you’ll face, what he calls making “the lonely decision.” He starts with sharply observed pitfalls and offers specific steps you can take to avoid them, staring with a process for defining what you need in a new hire and then moving on to this step:

Write down the strengths you want and the weaknesses that you are willing to tolerate. The firs step is to write down what you want. In order to ensure completeness, I find it useful to include criteria from the following sub-divisions when hiring executives:

• Will the executive be world class at running the function?

• Is the executive outstanding operationally? 

• Will the executive make a major contribution to the strategic direction of the company This is the “are they smart enough?” criteria. 

• Will the executive be an effective member of the team? Effective is the key word. It’s possible for an executive to be well liked and totally ineffective with respect to the other members of the team. It’s also possible for an executive to be highly effective and profoundly influential while being totally despised. The latter is far better. 

• These functions do not carry equal weight for all positions. Make sure that you balance them appropriately. Generally, operational excellence is far more important for a VP of Engineering or a VP of Sales than for a VP of Marketing or CFO.

Ben then gives more detail on how to turn the criteria into a real hire. At the conference, Eric will dive deep in an interview with Ben, asking him hard questions about hiring during growth and other shoals of entrepreneurship.  

Melissa Bell, Vox.com. We’re really pleased to have Melissa join us. Vox.com has been one of the most closely watched media launches of the year, and as its Senior Product Manager and Executive Editor, Melissa was responsible for leading a lot of its success. One of our questions for this year’s conference is: How can we get products to market faster? So we were particularly intrigued when we learned that Melissa and her team took just nine weeks to develop the high-profile site; other Vox Media properties had taken eight months to roll out.  

As explained in this post from Michael Lovitt, Vox’s VP of Engineering, Melissa and her team expedited their launch by sacrificing perfection and focusing their goals narrowly. Instead of spending months fine-tuning the website before presenting it to the world, they chose to “fail fast and iterate.” That phrase gets tossed around a lot these days, putting it in danger of losing its meaning. But Melissa backed it up with real processes, and rather than calling the unveiling of the site a “launch,” she instead wound up referring to it as a “deploy, the first of many.”

The team also worked with an ethos that would trust their MVP, which had two foundational pieces. Michael explains:

In order to meet our expectations for what a new Vox Media site must be, we would focus on two big things: the important early and foundational branding and visual design work; and a new, still-to-be-figured-out product feature for helping readers understand the news. By limiting the new big things to only those two, we could free ourselves to throw all of our creative energy into them, and do them well, and rely on the work done by our past selves to carry the rest of the site.

Once everyone agreed to this plan, in every conversation about scope and the prioritization of site features, we were able to stay grounded by our shared sense of what was important to get right for launch, and what could wait for now.
 

At The Lean Startup Conference, we’ll learn more from Melissa about how her team hewed to its early goals, what worked in developing the site, what she’d do differently next time, and how they’re tackling the site’s current growth and new challenges.

Seppo Helava, Nonsense Industry. We’re proud that The Lean Startup Conference brings you not only high-profile speakers and leaders from high-growth companies you already know about, but also excellent presenters you aren’t yet aware of. Indeed, we consider it our job to find relatively unknown people with great advice and experience to share. Seppo is one such speaker.

An accomplished game developer and company founder, Seppo has worked hard to figure out how to keep employees invested and productive—particularly in an environment where you’re running lots of experiments that don’t lead to profitable products. His application to speak at this year’s conference addressed this question: How can we keep up team morale when experiments invalidate a lot of our ideas? and he hooked up with his deep understanding of the problem and tangible ways to maintain co-workers’ enthusiasm.

Seppo laid out clearly something we all see pretty often: when you constantly test your ideas, you find that a lot of them don’t fly, and so you have to throw out work all the time. He went to talk about the natural attachment that employees feel to their projects, particularly those they’ve polished carefully, and the resulting struggle to move on, even when those projects aren’t proving out. That dynamic generates a fear of experimentation—the opposite of what you want on your team.

At the conference, Seppo will talk about how his company now works to answer a question, rather than develop a product for presentation. He’ll discuss not only their approach in terms of training, teamwork and communication, but how’s it’s played out over a period of refinement.

To see these speakers and a slew of other entrepreneurs with incredible lesson to share, register today for The Lean Startup Conference. Prices go up on Monday night!

PS. The second and final round of our call for proposals closes on Wednesday night. If you have advice or experience to share, consider applying!

New Call for Speakers and Top Three Reasons to Bring Your Child to The Lean Startup Conference

Post by Sarah Milstein & Eric Ries, co-hosts for The Lean Startup Conference

We’ve found more than half the speakers for The Lean Startup Conference, and we’re pretty excited about them. Ranging from Ben Horowitz, Mitch Kapor, Laura Klein and Cheryl Contee to entrepreneurs you probably don’t know but who have valuable stories to share, this year’s speakers—and mentors like Tim O'Reilly and Erin McKean—will help you become a more successful entrepreneur. 

We’re now seeking a few more speakers for the conference, December 8 – 12 in San Francisco, and we’ve opened a new round of our call for proposals. As we’ve laid out in the application form, we’re looking for talks that answer questions our attendees ask frequently, and we’re actively interested in people who aren’t regulars on the speaking circuit but who do have relevant experiences and advice to share. If you think that might be you, we encourage you to click over and consider applying. The deadline is September 3.

In other news, we’re pleased to announce that we’re now making the conference accessible to more people by offering onsite childcare. For years, The Lean Startup Conference has provided not only unique talks and opportunities to meet mutually useful entrepreneurs, we’ve also made a point of creating a respectful, energetic and professional environment for you. Offering onsite childcare is a way of leveling up that commitment. If you’re a parent, that means you can join us in San Francisco this December, and you can:

1. Focus on learning. Instead of worrying that you’ll be late to pick up your kids from daycare, you can concentrate on the conference speakers and opportunities to meet other relevant (adult) attendees. 
2. Turn the conference into a family vacation. Develop your professional life and nurture your family life at the same time. You won’t miss sessions to coordinate childcare or if you have a co-parent who needs to work while in town.
3. Know your kids are safe, entertained and nearby. We’re contracting with reputable childcare providers who know how show kids a great time.

We're not the first conference do offer onsite childcare. The AERO Conference, BlogHer and Mozilla Festival have been out ahead on this option. But it’s not yet common at conferences, and we want to help change that. Here's the FAQ for childcare at The Lean Startup Conference:

How does onsite childcare work? You can choose half-day or full-day childcare on the main conference days of December 10 and 11, for children 3 months and up. We’re designating space at The Fairmont San Francisco for this. Of course, The Fairmont is the conference venue, too, so you can stop in to say hi during breaks or at lunch. We’ll also provide a quiet space for nursing moms.

Who will care for my kids? We've contracted experienced childcare professionals who are recommended, screened to work with children, certified in CPR and First Aid, and uniformed. Your children will participate in kid-tested activities that are age-appropriate, stimulating, and of course, fun. Lunch and snacks are part of the deal.

How much does it cost? 5 hours or less: $100 per child. 5-9 hours: $180 per child.

How do I register for childcare? When you sign up for the conference, our registration page also gives you childcare options. To arrange for both days of childcare, select two tickets for the half- or full-day option. After you register, we'll follow up with you for additional information regarding your child.

Questions, including more than one kiddo or how to register for childcare on the workshop days of December 9 or 12? Email Executive Producer Melissa Tinitigan.

We hope to see you—and your family—in December!

A Few Surprising Facts about the 2014 Lean Startup Call for Speakers

Post written by Sarah Milstein & Eric Ries, co-hosts for The Lean Startup Conference

We’re seeking speakers we don’t already know for this year’s Lean Startup Conference, December 10 -11 in San Francisco. Our call for proposals is open now, and if you know already that you want to apply, jump to it (but read the directions first!).

If you’ve never applied to speak at The Lean Startup Conference before—or never even considered it before—here are a few things to keep in mind, some of them surprising:

You don’t have to be on the speaking circuit already. In fact, we’re psyched if you’re not a seasoned speaker. What we care about is the business experience you have to share, not the speaking experience. In other words, if you’ve applied Lean Startup techniques at your company, and you have advice or a story about your work that will help other entrepreneurs, we want to hear from you. While we’ll have a few speakers who are long-time Lean Startup experts, we’re primarily interested in case studies from people we don’t already know.

We don’t favor speakers we know personally. We aim to use the most meritocratic processes we can to find and evaluate speakers. That is to say: We don’t pick our speakers because they’re our friends or because they’re big names; we pick them because they have absolutely useful advice to share. In addition, we assess 95% of them via our call for proposals, which helps guide and standardize the submissions so that we’re comparing apples to apples (and not, for example, evaluating one proposal based on the recommendation of a mutual friend and another based on a video of the speaker from another conference).

Since we started focusing on fairness, a welcome though not surprising result is that we’ve regularly fielded a roster of excellent speakers that comprises more than 50% women and/or people of color. (In the past, the roster was nearly all white men, as those were the entrepreneurs Eric knew personally; they were very good speakers, too. But we now go much deeper into startup communities, finding speakers you won’t necessarily have heard elsewhere.)

Actually, we pre-select a very few. What about that other 5%? Full transparency: We do invite back particularly strong speakers from year to year, and we very occasionally invite entrepreneurs we meet out in the wild who strike us an unusually good fit for The Lean Startup Conference. We readily acknowledge that one of our best speakers in 2012 and 2013 was Sarah’s brother. We keep inviting him back because other entrepreneurs tell us they learn so much from him, not because he’s related to one of us.

We offer free speaker training. We do a lot of hands-on work with speakers to help ensure that your presentation really resonates with our audience. That includes, but is not limited to, both group and individual speaker training. If you’re a new speaker, this is a great opportunity to get some very good guidance (it’s also a great opportunity if you’re an experienced speaker; last year, some of our most avid trainees were our most accomplished presenters).

We’ll cover your travel costs. This year for the first time, we’re offering travel assistance for any speaker whose companies can’t cover it. We are ourselves a startup, and this represents a significant chunk of our budget, but we want to bring in speakers regardless of their own companies’ finances. (We also give all speakers a full Platinum Pass to the conference, but that ought to go without saying. If you register now to get the best price, and we subsequently pick you as a speaker, we’ll refund your ticket.)  

Our call for proposals has a lot of directions—but the form itself is short. Don’t be daunted by the first page of the call, which has a lot of information that we ask you to take in. Those directions will help you submit a successful proposal, and they include links to some of our favorite talks from last year, for inspiration.

This year, we’ve come up with the questions our attendees most want answered—so you don’t have to do that part. All you need to do is figure out where you can offer relevant advice or a case study, and fill out the application form accordingly.

The call for proposals is open until 11:59p PT on June 12, and we encourage you to apply today. If you’re not interested in speaking but you know you want to attend the conference, register now for the best prices.

A New Approach to The Lean Startup Conference

Post by Lean Startup Conference co-hosts Sarah Milstein & Eric Ries

We’re excited to announce this year’s Lean Startup Conference, December 8 – 12 in San Francisco. Tickets are on sale now, at the best price we’re offering this year, so we recommend registering today. But that’s not really what we’re here to talk about. Instead, we want to focus on the themes of the conference.

This year, we’re defining the conference program as a series of hard questions entrepreneurs commonly face, and we’ll address them in our talks and workshops. Below is our initial list of questions. We’d welcome your input on which of these challenges feel most vital to you, along with additional questions you and your team are facing. You can leave ideas in the comments or email Sarah Milstein, co-host for the conference and CEO of Lean Startups Productions.

Very soon, after we’ve refined this list, we’ll post our call for proposals from potential speakers, seeking talks that can answer the questions we’ve collected. [UPDATE: The call for proposals is now open.] If you’d like to learn when we open the call, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to this blog, or sign up for the newsletter on our site.

Questions we’re aiming to address at this year’s conference, by category:

Experiments and Process

• How can I ensure that meaningful customer feedback is included in our evaluation of new initiatives?
• How can I get new products, services, and internal initiatives to market more quickly?
• How can I design a good experiment--a minimum viable product--for services or internal customers?
• How can I create a sandbox for innovation with my organization without putting my core business in jeopardy?
• What can I do when a team proposes an experiment that might undermine our existing brand?
• How can I experiment and iterate quickly on mission-critical products and systems?
• How can I keep up team morale when experiments invalidate a lot of our ideas?
• What can I do when I have a handful of customers who absolutely love our new product, but not enough to meet our revenue or impact goals?

Metrics and Accountability

• How can I measure a new initiative before it has large numbers of customers or revenue?
• How can I measure a value hypothesis and a growth hypothesis at the same time?
• What metrics I can use to hold people accountable on projects that include extreme uncertainty?
• How can I measure impact when financial metrics are not the bottom line (or not the sole bottom), such as in NGOs, non-profits and governments?

Teams and People

• How can I convince my leaders and managers to support entrepreneurial methods? 
• How can I convince my co-workers and direct reports to use entrepreneurial methods? 
• How can I set up teams to ensure cross-functional collaboration?
• How can I get internal services like IT, finance, legal, and HR to act like startups and serve entrepreneurial teams throughout my organization?

Culture

• What does the culture of a high-performance, high-growth team look like?
• How can I build a culture that serves existing customers and unlocks new sources of growth?
• How can I best hire and train people who haven’t used Lean Startup methods before?

We look forward to your input on these questions in the comments or in email to Sarah—and we look forward to seeing you at the conference (register now for an honestly amazing deal).

Two New Experiments from The Lean Startup Conference Team

Guest post by Sarah Milstein, CEO of Lean Startup Productions

The 2013 Lean Startup Conference was a hit on several levels, with many people telling us it was the most valuable business conference they’d ever attended. To extend what we learned and help more people build and scale successful companies, we’re testing out two brand new events this spring:

* Office Optional, a one-day conference on April 22 in San Francisco. One of our most popular talks at The Lean Startup Conference was my interview with Matt Mullenweg, in which he talked about Automattic’s unusual setup: They have no true central office, and everyone works from home. With partially and fully distributed teams on the rise—but few established standards for running them well—we see an opportunity to bring people together for a rich exchange. This conference hits close to home for us, as Lean Startup Productions has two desks at WeWork Soma, a coworking space, but no office of our own and team members scattered around a range of cities and time zones.

* Quick Consulting, an evening event on March 27 in San Francisco. Inspired by the popularity of our experimental office-hours sessions at the 2013 Lean Startup Conference, we’re gathering more than 25 accomplished experts to bring you consultations for your business in a series of 15-minute, one-on-one conversations. This will be an intimate event designed to make it easy to meet other people and have high-quality, targeted discussions.

Below is more information on each event and some of the hypotheses we’re testing.

Office Optional. Although Yahoo famously recalled its remote workers last year, there’s no question that the workplace trend is toward more distributed teams. Driven by mandates for lower carbon emissions through reduced commuting, increased employee productivity and greater quality of life, paired with flexible technology, as much as 30% of the U.S. workforce now telecommutes. And yet, there’s still confusion over what to even call this kind of setup and who qualifies as a participant—let alone how to do it effectively. Our primary hypothesis is that with a growing number of remote workers in a variety of arrangements, innovative businesspeople—our core community—will find it valuable to come together to focus on solutions for successfully collaborating and managing from a distance.

(An in-person conference about remote work?! Is Henry Ford keynoting?! We get it. But we’ve found that certain discussions thrive in a live environment, and we believe this will be one of them. In fact, using face-to-face time really well is a topic for the conference—and we’ll help you make this event a highly useful place to meet with coworkers you don’t see often. For instance, we offer group packages that include meeting space for your team on the day before or after the conference. And, of course, we’ll provide a livestream of the talks; look for details on our site soon.)

How will we know we’ve succeeded? We measure event success in a number of ways including: whether attendees, speakers and sponsors say they would return again; whether our speakers get requests to talk at other conferences based on their presentations at ours; whether we’re able to cover our costs; and more qualitative feedback that we collect through interviews after the event.

We’ve just begun to announce speakers for Office Optional, with about a third of them now on our site and the rest to be revealed over the next couple of weeks. As you’ll see, we’ve got people from companies like Automattic and Yammer that are leading the way on distributed work, along with people from forward-looking service firms and non-profits that have terrific ideas we can all learn from. At the conference, which will have lots of Q&A with speakers, we’ll explore issues that include:

• Building trust at a distance
• Hiring, onboarding and training remote employees   
• Managing across time zones 
• Systems for communicating more and emailing less 
• Convincing colleagues to experiment with new tools 
• Tips and tricks for video calls, group chat, brainstorming software and more 
• Making in-person meetings very useful 
• Setting up satellite offices  
• The mechanics of successfully working from home 

You can expect to leave with several big ideas for thinking about distributed teams, plus 20 or 30 concrete pieces of advice you can implement tomorrow. Early-bird tickets are available through this week, and they’re priced to let the biggest range of people attend.

Quick Consulting. At the 2013 Lean Startup Conference, we were amazed by how energizing and valuable mentors and attendees alike found the office-hours sessions. Our primary hypothesis is that a structured format with short, focused, one-on-one conversation will help eliminate awkward introductions and the distance between experts and attendees. Because it’s a bit tricky to ensure that all of the attendees have enough conversations to make the evening worthwhile, our secondary hypothesis is that we can create a format that meets everyone’s needs. That “everyone” includes Rackspace, which is hosting this event at their cool Soma space.

How will we know we’ve succeeded? The event is small—just over 25 mentors and 45 attendees—so in addition to a baseline survey in which we’ll ask whether people would join Quick Consulting again, we’ll be able to have follow-up conversations with a big percentage of participants after the event. Incidentally, we’re concierging the expert-attendee matchups, doing it by hand, which is no small task (the software we used for scheduling matchups at The Lean Startup Conference doesn’t have enough flexibility for the approach we’re taking here). If the overall format is a hit, we’ll look at automating this aspect of the event.

Our stellar list of experts have deep expertise in Lean Startup methods, entrepreneurship, user research, design, analytics, engineering management, PR, social media, startup law, corporate innovation, social-sector innovation, venture capital and more. Tickets for Quick Consulting cost $99, and there are just a few left. (If you can’t swing the standard $99 ticket price, we’ve set aside $30 scholarship tickets. Apply here to be considered.)

 For both Quick Consulting and Office Hours, we’re continuing our work to ensure that we chose speakers by the most meritocratic processes possible and that we foster an atmosphere of lively learning. We hope to see you at one or both events, and we look forward to getting your feedback on whether our experiments are on target.

Join the Conversation at The Lean Startup Conference – Three Ways To Participate

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.

With five days remaining before The Lean Startup Conference, we wanted to lay out what we’re offering that’s unlike any other entrepreneurship conference and explain the different levels of participation available to you. From livestream simulcast to a six-day, high-intensity immersion experience, it’s possible to join the conference to whatever degree suits your interest and your schedule. And we hope that when you join, you'll come ready to share your experiences and advice with other participants.

What you’ll see at all of our events—whether on the stage, in the workshops, at a mentoring session, or in the site visits—is something other than conference regulars pitching presentations on the usual themes. Instead, we’ve assembled a diverse, energetic roster of experts prepared to talk about advanced entrepreneurship topics like maintaining a culture of experimentation at a growing company, bringing an analytical and iterative model to non-profits (including mission-driven and educational organizations), or converting enterprise teams to a cross-functional structure. And that’s not to mention the advice for very early-stage companies on topics like getting your first users, or choosing metrics. If you already know the topics that interest you, you can browse all the talks and events on that theme—whether it’s MVPs, Analytics, or Education—on our “sessions by theme” page.

We chose our speakers for the expertise they have to share, not their familiarity on the conference circuit, and as a result, we offer an exceptionally diverse group. We’re committed to opening up not just the stage, but participation in the conference itself, too. For anyone not able to attend in person, we offer free a livestream to any community group in the world that has at least 10 people gathered together at a single location. There are already over 100 confirmed livestream hosts worldwide; join one near you, or apply to add a new group. The livestream site will include a chat area for all of the livestream hosts, an opportunity to connect and network around the world.

The livestream will let you see all of the events in the Masonic Theater in San Francisco on Monday and Tues. That includes Monday talks like Eric Ries on the state of the startup; Kimberly Bryant of Black Girls Code on accomplishing a lot with limited resources; Dan Milstein on balancing risk, information, time and money; Kent Beck on Jazz Engineering; plus meaty interviews with Mutt Mullenweg and Reid Hoffman. You’ll also see the afternoon breakout sessions in the Masonic Theater, including Laura Klein on testing ideas. Tuesday’s Masonic Theater talks include Kathryn Minshew on acquiring early users; the Intuit team talking about lessons of Lean Startup leadership; and Steve Blank on evidence-based entrepreneurship. You’ll also see afternoon breakouts on advanced A/B testing from Wyatt Jenkins and Microsoft’s Cindy Alvarez and Ethan Gur-esh on transitioning teams to Lean. And you'll get Tuesday's closing session with entrepreneurship experts Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon.

Of course, there are some major perks to attending in person. Anyone with a conference pass (including scholarship recipients) can join us on Sunday, December 8 for Ignite, a high-energy, rapid-fire event, in which our brave presenters get five minutes and 20 slides, with each slide advancing on an automatic 15-second timer. Anything can and will happen. On December 9 and 10, you’ll have in-person access not only to everything in the Masonic Theater, but also to breakout sessions held next door at the Fairmont Hotel, such as, on Monday, Summit Public Schools’ Diane Tavenner on institutionalizing innovation, or, on Tuesday, Optum’s Maureen Allen discussing Lean Startup at regulated companies, and Beth Kolko on working closely with global customers.

On both days, in-person attendees can sign up for office hours, in which you sit down face-to-face, individually, with a mentor or conference presenters and talk about what’s on your mind. For example, you can ask Diana Kander of the Kauffman Foundation about pitfalls to avoid when launching a new product, or Joe Dunn of Cloudbreak about how to get buy-in for Lean Startup within your organization. All conference attendees are also invited to two workshops on December 11: one, sponsored by Modus Create, teaches you five Lean Startup planning exercises you can immediately use to add mobile to your enterprise app portfolio; the other, sponsored by Rackspace, focuses on using cloud infrastructure to experiment and innovate rapidly.

In response to feedback from last year requesting more ways to meet and learn from fellow attendees, we’ve created an online attendee network, among other things, so that you can connect with others who share your professional interests. Of course, you’re also invited to our December 9 evening reception, an event sponsored by Pivotal Labs and designed to foster productive networking in a professional, alcohol-limited environment. During lunch, you can sample some of San Francisco’s famous food truck culture from trucks we’ve invited especially for the conference. And in the evenings, we’ve organized small-group dinners around San Francisco that attendees can join. Conference registrants will also get some very nice freebies via access to the sponsor tables and giveaways. Our sponsors include companies like Intuit, O’Reilly Media and Amazon Web Services.

For those who want a deeper Lean Startup experience, we offer the Gold pass, which includes access to our exclusive workshops and site visits on December 11. These workshops include hands-on, intense instruction in techniques like continuous delivery; innovation accounting; Lean Analytics; and Lean Startup for HR, IT, and finance teams. These aren’t just talks, they’re interactive entrepreneurship training sessions. You can also join site visits to Square, Kiva, Pivotal Labs, and WeWork Soma, where you’ll learn what each of these successful companies is doing to build and keep its edge.

Our VIP pass is for folks who are serious about building a deep understanding of entrepreneurship, and a corresponding professional network, in one intense week. You can begin the conference early with a one-day Leancamp on December 8, an unconference to help you meet other people, get feedback on your current challenges and actionable advice on applying Lean Startup in your work. On December 12 and 13, after the conclusion of the main conference, the workshops, and the site visits, VIP pass holders can our partner program with UPGlobal (formerly Startup Weekend): a Lean Startup immersion program. You’ll launch a startup in 54 hours, creating mobile, web and software innovations with a team of fellow participants. This includes developing and pitching a concept, customer development, idea validation, and creation of an MVP under guidance from an experienced mentor. You’ll put Lean Startup ideas into practice, getting expert feedback the entire time, and end the week with the sense that Lean Startup has left the realm of theory and become a true practice. 

At whatever level you can join us, we are proud to welcome you to an event that we’ve organized to be a different kind of tech conference—certainly because of our speakers’ diversity and range of experience, but also thanks to the commitment, interest, and variety of our attendees. Please join us at whatever level you can, and be prepared to participate in the conversation. We’re looking forward to hearing from you.