At a Glance

In this 1 hour introductory workshop, you will receive an overview of the entire lean startup process and supporting tools, backed by real-world case studies and hands-on activities. You will also be left with a small experiment to test the merits of the lean startup in your workplace.

“We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.” ― Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

Why The Lean Startup Changes Everything

According to Stanford professor, serial entrepreneur and father of the lean startup movement, Steve Blank, launching a new startup or initiative within a large corporation—has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. You write a business plan, pitch it to investors, assemble a team, introduce a product, and start selling as hard as you can. And somewhere in this sequence of events, you’ll probably suffer a fatal setback.

The odds are not with you: As new research by Harvard Business School’s Shikhar Ghosh shows, 75% of all start-ups fail.

However, The Lean Startup, 2011’s book by Eric Ries, has popularised the lean startup methodology which advocates experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional ‘big bang’ design and development up front. Today, both start-ups and large companies are embracing concepts such as ‘minimum viable products’ and rapid prototyping to radically improve the likelihood of finding product market fit, without wasting millions of dollars or several years looking for it.

The lean startup for large companies

Lean start-up practices aren’t just for young tech ventures. Large companies, such as GE, Qualcomm and Intuit, have begun to implement them successfully.

Why traditional methods for product development are broken

1. Business plans rarely survive first contact with customers. As the boxer Mike Tyson once said about his opponents’ prefight strategies: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
2. No one besides venture capitalists and the late Soviet Union requires five-year plans to forecast complete unknowns. These plans are generally fiction, and dreaming them up is almost always a waste of time.
3. Start-ups are not smaller versions of large companies. They do not unfold in accordance with master plans. The ones that ultimately succeed go quickly from failure to failure, all the while adapting, iterating on, and improving their initial ideas as they continually learn from customers.