Presented by Paul Coia at meetup of Agile Product Owners and Business Analysts Group at Redbubble HQ on April 30th 2014.

1. Journey towards being Lean
Paul Coia, CTO

2. Timeline
Original
Vision
2006 2010
Customer
Research

3. Young company
Rapidly growth
Sprung leaks
Lots of operational “projects”

4. Running again
Lots of energy to builds “feature”
Not a lot of retrospection

5. 2011
Growing awareness of new customers
Many possible initiatives
How to choose?

6. Executive prioritisation
Minor business cases
Planning meeting
Often based on very limited information
Not a lot of retrospection
Reinforced an execution only mindset

7. Innovation?
Were we making the right choices?
We had limited resources - it had to count
Often encouraged conservative action
Focus on what we already knew (optimisation)

8. 2012 - a new approach
Two teams, broad focus: search and destroy
Social + Discovery
3 month cycle

9. Now
Multiple cross-functional teams
Short iterative cycles
Teams present Learnings not project milestones
Prioritisation of opportunity areas

10. Every step is a learning
Need a tempo
Need a direction (not a project plan)
Need good, available information sources
Need to understand experimentation
Need short cycle times - Agile, Continuous Delivery

11. Final takeaway
Get Build, Measure, Learn right
...but do Customer Development really well