Customer Experience

Make Customer Experience Your Organisation’s Competitive Advantage

The Customer Experience crash course equips you to create 'WOW' experiences to strengthen customer loyalty.

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

 

At a Glance

A startup is a temporary institution designed to search for product-market fit. The same challenges apply whether that is an internal project within a large company or a couple of founders working out of a cafe.

According to Deloitte Private, only 4% of Australian startups become successful companies. 

The other 96% rarely fail because the product doesn’t work. Usually, it’s because they develop products that they THINK people will want and spend all their resources perfecting their product before showing it to customers who don’t want to buy it.

Startups that succeed are those that manage to iterate (make changes) based on validated customer learnings enough times before they run out of resources

Time between iterations is FUNDAMENTAL

“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

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.”

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.

Startups 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.

The Course

You will not only will you receive an overview of the entire lean startup process and supporting tools, backed by real-world case studies and immersive activities but you will also be asked to come with an idea and you will leave with a working prototype and some validated learnings. 

This will help you quickly and cheaply determine whether or not you’re onto a winner, which elements of your business model need tweaking, what features you need to think about and you will start to gain an appreciation for which marketing and distribution channels work best. 

You will also be able to tap into the collective knowledge and opinions of your peers as well as expert insights of the facilitator and guest speakers.

Who Should Take This Workshop?

If you answer yes to any of the following questions then the lean startup short course is for you.

  1. Do you have an idea for a startup but aren’t sure where to begin?
  2. Are you working for a large company and have an idea you’d like to explore on the side?
  3. Already working on a startup but not getting the results you’d like (and wasting a lot of money doing so)?
  4. Looking to implement the lean startup within a large company or an SME?
  5. Looking to get involved in internal innovation projects at a large company?

What To Bring

  • Pad and pen
  • The right side of your brain
  • Laptop
February cohort students in our 14-hour startup workshop

WHAT TO EXPECT

Day One 

  • What is a startup?
  • Why startups fail
  • Why startups succeed
  • Identify an Idea (if you haven’t got one already!) – don’t worry if it’s good or bad, nobody really knows at this stage!
  • The disruptive innovation litmus test
  • Tech risk vs market risk
  • The technology adoption lifecycle
  • Vertical v horizontal markets
  • Customer job to be done
  • Stand in the customer’s shoes and define the customer pain – is it big enough and real enough?
  • Defining your value proposition
  • Building your business model
  • Identify your riskiest and most key assumptions
  • Define where you are today and what your ideal is (how do you measure success?)
  • Define experiments to best validate or invalidate these assumptions
  • Intro to virtual prototypes and minimum viable products 
  • Minimum product v whole product
  • Learn fast, fail fast and iterate

Day Two

  • Prototype development
  • Guest Speaker – How To Run a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign to Validate Your Idea
  • Actionable, auditable and accessible metrics
  • Defining target personas
  • Lean marketing and customer acquisition
  • Intro to Analytics
  • Prototype presentation
  • Validated learnings presentation
  • Business model evaluation and update
  • Pivot or proceed decision
  • Funding Models
  • Guest Speaker – How To Raise Seed Funding
  • Compiling a Pitch Deck
  • Pitching Practice
  • Q&A with class and facilitator
  • Celebratory breakup drinks (!)
What kind of prototypes will you build?
  • Websites / Minimum Viable Products (MVPs)
  • Website Landing Pages
  • Mobile App Prototype
  • Powerpoint Prototypes
  • 3D Printed Prototypes
  • Paper Prototypes
  • Cardboard Prototypes
  • Sketches
  • Lego Prototypes

Interested? Enquire with us

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