If you’ve ever been to The Lean Startup Conference, you’ll know that some of the best opportunities to learn come from fellow attendees—entrepreneurs, product strategists, and transformation leaders from around the world.

We’re launching a ‘meet the community’ blog series to help you learn how to create a culture of innovation, turn ideas into products, and build a sustainable business. You’ll also get a glimpse of the Lean Startup practitioners (i.e. rockstars) you’ll meet this November at the conference.

First up is Andrea Hill, a Denver-based intrapreneur, product strategist, and marathon runner (both in and out of the office). She’s helping audio and web conferencing provider ReadyTalk, launch an internal startup and bring a new product to market. Here’s what she has to share.

Tell us about what brought you and your team to the Lean Startup Conference in 2014—and what’s bringing you back in 2015.

Hill: We’ve become interested in Lean Startup principles to develop new lines of business. Prior to attending the conference we were trying to balance doing customer discovery and working on new problems while also serving our existing customers.

We had a cross-functional group from product, technology, and finance who attended: our CFO, our director of engineering, director of product management, enterprise agile coach, product strategist (me) and a product manager. The biggest benefit was that we could divide and conquer.

We tried to have coverage for all sessions, and then meet over lunch and dinner to share our learnings and reflections. I thought it was great to have a team there as we were more effective in coming back and sharing our learnings with the rest of the organization.

The experience from 2014 helped us integrate lean into the company. We launched our beta of ubimeet.com in March 2015, helping people run more effective meetings. We are now in the product-market fit stage and are coming back to the Lean Startup Conference to explore this next stage of our product development.

What are some of the biggest changes that you’ve made in the last year?

Hill: The biggest takeaway was that Lean Startup wasn’t something we could enter into half-heartedly. The innovation accounting workshop from the 2014 program helped us convince our COO that a Lean Startup team needed to be held to different standards of success than development in our more established line of business. We now use metrics like cost-per-learning and validation velocity to show progress since more traditional things like ROI weren’t applicable.

One of the biggest changes in corporate mindset that allowed us to innovate was the recognition that things didn’t have to be perfect and complete before release; that we actually didn’t even know what that meant.

We knew our initial release offered value but it wasn’t as fully-featured as we may have wished. With our parent brand, we’d have been concerned about not meeting the needs of all of our users, but we were okay with releasing something and working with customers to help determine the order in which we’d develop additional functionality (and whether we had to build it at all!)

The product is a meeting productivity tool, and after three months with beta testers on the service, we were able to better understand the type of meeting organizer who finds the most value from the product. We could then focus on building a product that really fit in with the workflow of our strongest advocates, rather than trying to guess. It meant we had to make the hard decision to drop support for one platform, but that allowed our engineering team to focus on what would have the most impact for our best users.

We’ve reached a point in our process in which we need to be laser-focused on only doing tasks that added customer value.

What tools are helping you drive change and innovation within your organization?

Hill: We adopted the use of the Lean Canvas as a primary resource to describe the business opportunity, and drive our experiments.

The canvas was displayed prominently when we met with internal stakeholders to help them understand what we were actively working on, and give them confidence we had a backlog of experiments to run to challenge assumptions.

What were some of the biggest challenges that you’ve addressed?

Hill:  Prior to attending the conference we were trying to balance doing customer discovery and working on new problems while also serving our existing customers. Innovation accounting helped us understand the need to dedicate folks to these types of initiatives, and we were able to get the corporate buy-in to do so as a type of experiment in and of itself.

As a result we’ve been able to iterate much more quickly, and overcome some of the executive fear of releasing something into the wild in an MVP state. As it turned out, some of our first external testers immediately latched onto the value proposition and said they’d have no hesitation in recommending it to others.

What are you looking forward to learning at the Lean Startup Conference in November?

Hill: I’m really looking forward to returning this year with some practical experience under my belt. Now that I’ve been through one cycle of intrapreneurship, I’m eager to learn how to formalize this within our organization so we can have more concepts being explored in parallel.

To use a metaphor anyone reading this will be familiar with, Lean Startup is the solution to a problem we had at ReadyTalk (new product innovation). The next step is how to scale it!

Interested in results like this for yourself? You’ll make a great addition to the 2015 Lean Startup Conference community. Join us on November 16-19 at Fort Mason. Come away with new Lean Startup contacts and actionable takeaways that you can immediately apply at your company. Click here for all the details and to register now.

This post was written by @ritika puri, resident storyteller at The Lean Startup Conference.

Summer is heating up — and so are we! We’ve been publishing, reading, and tweeting up a storm about all the great stories in the Lean Startup community. We don’t want you to miss out on flexing your entrepreneurial muscles while you’re away at the beach, so at the start of each month, we’ll be packaging our favorite articles for you to read.

But first, check out our newly launched sponsors and community partner pages, which feature discounts from partners like TechCrunch Disrupt. We’ll be adding more deals and perks from partners in the months to come. (Interested in sponsoring? Email [email protected])

For some new reading material, bookmark the following 7 articles:

1 – Five Tips for Quickly Testing Your Idea
Source: Intuit Labs

When it comes to running experiments, you have a lot of options for techniques to try— sometimes too many to know where you should start. Intuit Labs decided to tackle this ‘analysis paralysis’ challenge by interviewing three speakers from the Lean Startup community: Yammer’s head of user experience Cindy Alvarez, Solve for Interesting founder Alistair Croll, and Adknowledge’s VP of marketing Anita Newton. Learn how these three leaders tackle their biggest experimentation challenges.

2 – Lean Innovation Management
Source: Steve Blank

It’s hard for established companies to innovate. When your primary responsibility is to your shareholders, it can be challenging to justify a new investment or pivot in direction. Long-term, however, innovation is critical to keeping your business alive and outpacing your competition (before a competitor sweeps in). What you need is a model that supports innovation without distracting teams from their core operations. Steve Blank’s framework for Lean Innovation Management provides great insight to help you get started.

3 – What a 123 Year Old Company Can Teach Us About Innovation
Source: Lean Startup Co.

It’s commonly known that most ventures fail within their first three years of operation. So when we look at a company like GE that has been around for more than 123 years, we can’t help but wonder what’s happening behind the scenes. Read this blog post for a recap of Lean Startup Company’s recent webinar with Mark Little, GE’s director of global research.

4 – Inside Obama’s Stealth Startup
Source: FastCompany

Learn how the Obama Administration silently recruited top talent from companies like Google and Facebook to reboot the government. This in-progress story will be fun to watch over the coming years, as it continues to unfold.

5 – Innovation Tips from the First U.S. CTO
Source: Lean Startup Co.

In April 2009, the Obama Administration appointed Aneesh Chopra, Virginia’s then Secretary of Technology, to be the first CTO of the United States. Soon after, Chopra found himself immersed in a billion dollar immigration project, a program to help Veterans retrieve healthcare records faster, and an initiative to help accelerate approval processes within the gold standard of bureaucratic organizations—the FDA. Learn how Chopra’s team outsmarted these constraints to get things done.

6 – How to Implement Hypothesis Driven Development
Source: ThoughtWorks

Barry O’Reilly, principal at ThoughtWorks, co-author of Lean Enterprise, walks us through the nuts and bolts of forming focused hypotheses and using the scientific method to drive software development. Read this story to rethink how you’re framing your business stories.

7 – How 5 Companies Created a Culture of Innovation
Source: The Next Web

Some businesses make innovation look easy. While most of us are struggling to find the right idea, certain brands seem to have everything together—steady streams of new products, never-before-seen branding concepts, and serious creative magic. Read this blog post to see the science behind these processes.

Interested in continuing the discussion from what you’ve just read? You’ll make a great addition to the 2015 Lean Startup Conference community. Join us on November 16-19 at Fort Mason. Come away with new Lean Startup contacts and actionable takeaways that you can immediately apply at your company. Click here for all the details and to register now.

This post was written by Ritika Puri, resident storyteller at The Lean Startup Conference.

It’s mid-summer, and the Lean Startup team is in the midst of planning the 2015 conference. We’re laser focused on creating a real-world experience that pulls you out of your digital life, if only for a few days. Our conference home will be historic Fort Mason, which lends a college-campus vibe to the program. And that’s not unintentional — it’s the perfect backdrop for our community to gather under one roof and have stimulating discussions, with very few distractions (but yes, there will be wifi).

A program with a diverse set of speakers and topics has always been the central tenet for the conference, and this year is no exception. Between the Lean Startup community, attendee feedback, faculty and advisors, we have received awesome recommendations that we’re excited to share with you as we put it all together.

The Conference Program

The conference program will include deep dive discussions on customer development, design/ux, leadership, management, and product/market fit; but, we’ll also focus on specific areas like Lean Startup in non-profit, education, and purpose-driven environments. We’ll have a Lean Startup 101 workshop for those of you new to the practice, and a track designed for corporate innovators in the enterprise sector. We want you to leave feeling energized and able to immediately apply what you’ve learned at the conference directly to your business.

To get a preview of what we’re putting together, be sure to check out our webcast series and soon-to-be announced podcast series, which will feature speakers and faculty from this year’s conference.

Last, but definitely not least, please meet the newest group of luminaries who will be joining Lean Startup this fall in San Francisco:

• Amanda Richardson, VP Product for hot startup Hotel Tonight, on product/market fit
• Alan Lobock, the Chief Executive of Spartacus Muse and professor at ASU enlightens us with lessons on why Lean Startup principles can improve management
• James Warren, CEO/founder of Share More Stories – a former corporate marketer tells us how customer development shifted his entire business model in the first year
• Christina Wodtke, Wodtke Consulting & Stanford University – one the most popular speakers from LSC 2014 returns to lead a hands-on session about early stage customer development
• Rishi Dave, CMO, Dun & Bradstreet, joins us to talk about applying Lean Startup to the (very successful) modernization of the Dun & Bradstreet brand
• Eric Hellweg, Managing Director, Digital Strategy/Editorial Director at Harvard Business Review joins us to talk about turning a 122-year old brand into an agile shop by applying the Lean Startup method
• Dave Binetti, Principal, Dinadesa and Creator of the Innovation Options Framework – another popular speaker from 2014 delivers another session focused on innovation accounting
• Andrew Breen, VP Product Delivery, American Express brings perspective on creating a Lean Startup shop within the iconic financial services enterprise
• Amy Jo Kim, Creative Director, Social Game Designer / Mentor at Maven Ventures | VC & Incubator will teach you how to turbo-charge your early product design
• Prerna Gupta, founder & CEO, Telepathic demonstrates why the Lean Startup method could disrupt Hollywood (really).

We’re excited to share the editorial experience with you as we put the conference together.

As always, please let us know if there’s anyone you’d like to hear from, any topics you’d like us to consider, or any questions you may have about the conference. Email me at Kirsten [at] 2015.leanstartup.co

The Lean Startup Conference

The conference is a gathering for entrepreneurs, corporate innovators, and thought leaders from across sectors and structures. A fast paced, highly curated program featuring the best of the Lean Startup community, it is held on November 16 – 19 in San Francisco. You’ll receive practical ways to immediately implement the Lean Startup methodology into your daily business. You can get a great deal with our Summer Sale – click here for all the details.

This post was written by Kirsten Cluthe, Editorial Director of The Lean Startup Conference.

Remember that time your corporate innovator guru told you to get advice from your lawyers? Yeah, neither do we. That is, until we heard it from Lean Startup pioneer, Eric Ries. We recently hosted the author of The Lean Startup and The Leader’s Guide at our April live Lean Lunch Google Hangout. In addition to revealing the secrets to getting senior management onboard when adopting lean innovation.  Ries also spoke about how lawyers, regulatory experts, and even government officials are helping push the Lean Startup movement forward.

Time to call your lawyer

A company Ries did a workshop for planned to launch a product that had been successful in the U.S. into 42 additional countries. The company had an 18-month rollout plan with massive TV campaigns in each country, and was planning to launch the product campaign in all countries simultaneously. Through the Lean Startup workshop, Ries and the team decided that it would be safer to test whether people in each country would buy the product, and then tune the rollout plan accordingly.

“We agree to do a minimum viable product where the company offers the product for pre-order in select countries, and a hundred people will get the chance to pre-order this product,” Ries said. “The deal was if you give us your credit card right now, we would send you the English-language version of the product today, and we would also send you the localized version when it came out in your country.”

Many of the countries have lots of English speakers who would, the hypothesis goes, be able to use the English version of the product.

“Hold on, the legal department will never go for it. The security and liability of holding the credit cards, there’s always a regulatory issue,” someone said.

“To hold a hundred credit cards? Are you sure?” Ries asked. “Who from legal told you that? What is the name of the person who told you that?”

“No one has to tell us, we just know it,” the team member said.

Ries got the name of the person in the legal department who has the authority to make a decision on the phone. The team member starts explaining the issue to the General Counsel.

“Excuse me Mr. General Counsel, do you mind if we go into a bunch of countries and take a bunch of customers’ credit card numbers, and tell them we’re going to ship them a product but we’re not really sure if we’re going to,” the team member said.

“They’re describing this experiment the worst possible way,” Ries said. “So I said to the General Counsel, ‘We’d like to take 100 people’s credit card and offer them a product that has a retail value of $30 for a maximum liability to the company of $3,000 total. Does that change how you feel about it?’  And the General Counsel said, ‘Why are you calling me?  You don’t need my permission for this. This conversation that we just had right now has already cost the company more money than the total liability of this experiment.  Why are you wasting my time with this?  Go do it.’”

Ries described the team’s response as surprised and confused—was this a trick?

“In that particular scenario we built for the company a series of guidelines from the legal department that said if you meet these requirements you are pre-authorized to run these kinds of experiments,” Ries said. “And legal went from being part of the problem to part of the solution and it was very cool.”

How did a product launch team get tripped up by their own misconceptions about what is and is not allowed? In some companies, each function works in its own silo, unaware of how the other functions actually impact the business. When companies are organized like that, it builds antagonism and politics—leading to people and departments getting in their own way. The assumption that you’re not going to get any support, so why even ask, is a huge obstacle. That kind of self-editing can be deadly in a business.

Are requirements required?

Ries told us about a project at General Electric where the traditional waterfall process was very long. It’s a highly capital intensive, heavily regulated project that requires a lot of engineering. When the marketing team asked the engineering team how long it would take to build a product with X-level efficiency, the engineering team responded that it would take 9 years.

“One of big powers of a minimum viable product is that if you take a proposed product to a customer and have them react to it and ask them to actually pre-order it, you can ask them what the true requirements are,” Ries said.

I actually hate the word requirements as applied to product specification, because honestly, on this earth, the laws of physics are required, everything else is optional.”

What the team found through collecting pre-orders and feedback from customers was that the X-level efficiency was not as important to customers as getting the product fast.

“The customers were willing to make all kinds of compromises,” Ries said. “And what’s cool about this kind of testing is that by conducting the experiments with easier specifications each time you run an experiment, your engineers have it a lot easier.”

This resulted in a simpler and cheaper product with a shorter time to delivery.

“The regulators loved it too because it’s much more likely to produce a safe outcome because there’s less uncertainty about what’s going to happen,” Ries said. “Regulators are often asked to approve these installations seven years in advance before anyone knows anything about whether something is safe and that’s a nightmare scenario for them. So compressing the timeline is really a win for everybody.”

Better products through better process

These examples illustrate the lineage of Lean Startup. The lean manufacturing concept of continuous improvement was about not just building better products but about improving the process. And improvements in the process can come from anywhere.

Ries mentioned that Lean Startup has infiltrated the US Government, too, much due to the efforts of former US CTO, Todd Park. If lawyers, regulators, and even the government are advancing the methods of Lean Startup, then what are the limits of lean innovation?

“As the universe of Lean practitioners expands,” Ries said, “the zone of where you can’t do Lean Startup is shrinking to the point that I am not even sure anymore. I’ve met people working on all kinds of stuff that violate the ‘rules.’”

This post was written by Brant Cooper from Moves the Needle. Moves the Needle brings Lean Startup to the enterprise. At the intersection of creative inspiration and scientific rigor, Moves The Needle’s methods help organizations build deep customer empathy, apply rapid experimentation for idea validation, and make evidence-based decisions in order to continuously innovate.

The Lean Startup Conference — a gathering for entrepreneurs, corporate innovators, and thought leaders from across sectors and structures — is a fast paced, highly curated program featuring the best of the Lean Startup community. Held on November 16 – 19 in San Francisco, you’ll receive practical ways to immediately implement the Lean Startup methodology into your daily business. http://2015.leanstartup.co/

It’s commonly known that most ventures fail within their first three years of operation. So when we look at a company like GE that has been around for more than 123 years, we can’t help but wonder what’s happening behind the scenes.

It seems odd to think of the 8th biggest company in the world as innovative when there are 14-year-olds creating artificial intelligence technologies in their basements, and twenty-something geniuses like Danielle Fong are figuring out new ways to store energy (awesome, huh?).

If there’s one thing that we’ve learned as Lean Startup practitioners, it’s that we need to challenge our assumptions and look beyond our initial gut reactions. GE has been around for 123 years because it has adapted to continuously changing markets as part of its core business. Innovation might not take the same shape or form of a Silicon Valley Startup—but that’s because larger organizations face completely different types of constraints. And companies like GE in particular have thousands of people to mobilize and rely on heavy research and development processes.

GE has been a core presence at The Lean Startup Conference since the earliest days of the Lean Startup movement. We’ve invited them back, year after year, to learn more about what they’re up to and follow the company’s progress over the long-term.

As a preview to GE’s session this November, Lean Startup Co. hosted a webcast with GE’s head of Global Research Mark Little, Eric Ries, and Lean Healthcare expert Mark Graban as a moderator, to answer a question that our community often asks: “What makes big companies like GE innovative?”

Watch a recap of our webcast to learn more:

The Story Through the Lens of GE’s Mark Little:

• “In a turbine design project in our oil and gas business which has normally a three-year cycle, we decided to do some things in a parallel rather than serial pathway. That meant we had to build up some extra inventory which we loathe to do. But the result of that was much better speed to market.”
• “What we’ve recognized is we need to get learnings from our customers as fast as possible. In thinking through the whole concept of minimum viable products, we decided to adapt an existing product and bring it to market early. But the miraculous thing is, we actually got about $50 million worth of business for that minimum viable product that we never expected to get.”
• “The notion that we can learn and get better by the learning as opposed to defending the PowerPoint charts that predict the future that’s really unknown is a powerful thing for us. It’s really shifted the way we think to wanting to get that learning as fast as we possibly can with MVPs across virtually everything we do.”
• “The FDA regulatory environment is a really good place to focus this on. We cannot in any way avoid getting regulatory approval on things, but what we can do faster is get the steps in place before we get to the regulatory approval to make sure that when we get there we not only have a device that’s high quality and reliable performance, but is suitable to the market. So it’s the preceding process that really matters.”

Intrigued? Bring your questions to the 2015 Lean Startup Conference where Director of GE Global Research Mark Little, GE’s Culture Leader Janice Sempler, GM and CTO of Hybrid Fuel Cells Johanna Wellington, will offer their perspectives. Learn more about the conference here

This post was written by Ritika Puri, resident storyteller at The Lean Startup Conference.