Mark Geene, CEO/Co-founder of Cloud Elements presented "Lean Product Development for Startups" at Denver Startup Week 2013. Check out the presentation for information on how to build a Lean startup. Based on principles from 'Lean Startup' by Eric Ries, 'Running Lean' by Ash Maurya and '500 Startups' by Dave McClure.

1. Lean product development 101
mark geene @mgeene

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LEAN Product development PRINCIPLES
What’s “Lean”?
Creating the maximum value while applying the fewest
amount of resources (e.g., people, capital)

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BUILD-MEASURE-LEARN FEEDBACK LOOP*
*Lean Startup, Eric Ries

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LEAN Product development PRINCIPLES
1. Build the right thing; By iterating
2. Discover problems by talking to customers
3. More features are not the answer
4. Determine Problem/Solution Fit with an MVP
5. Measure Results … AARRR

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Problem/solution fit
• Is this a problem worth solving?
• Must-Have (Is it something customers/users need?)
• Viable (Will they pay for it?)
• Feasible (Can it be solved with available resources?)
• Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
• Purpose is to address problem/solution fit
• Minimum set of features required to learn from “earlyvangelists”
• Visionary Early Adopters are the initial targets for MVP
• Visionary customers can “fill in the gaps” on missing features if the MVP product
solves a real problem
• “Do the smallest thing possible to learn”
• Test your hypothesis, learn and iterate
Running Lean, Ash Maurya,
Lean Startup, Eric Ries

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STARTUP METRICS FOR pirates*
• Acquisition – Are users finding you?
• Activation – Do users have a great first experience?
• Retention – Do users come back?
• Referral – Do users like it enough to tell others?
• Revenue – Are users willing to pay for it?
* Dave McClure, 500 Startups

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About Cloud Elements
Cloud Elements is a API Management Service that reduces
the time and cost required for developers to integrate,
monitor and maintain cloud services by consolidating APIs
into “one-to-many” hubs

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Element Hubs: 1 to Many Integrations
Documents Hub Example:
Other
Document
Services
Your
APP
7 API

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API Management service

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7 STEP MVP process
1. Form a hypothesis that you want to test
 “Developers spend too much time integrating cloud services”
2. Develop a small set of (measurable) questions to
illuminate the problem
 How many services have you integrated?
 How many do you plan to integrate?
 Which services?
 How much time did it take to integrate each?
 How much time do you spend maintaining each?

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7 STEP MVP process
3. Define the MVP
 Uniform API for SendGrid and Twilio
 Integrate only; no monitoring or maintenance features
4. Build the MVP
 (More on this later …)
5. Measure the MVP’s impact on the hypothesis
 Reduce time spent integrating by 50% or more
 Spread cost over 3 years or 5 years?

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7 Step MVP Process
6. Use early adopters to find the high impact use cases
 App developers who need to integrate to multiple providers of
the same type of service
 Managing tens, hundreds, thousands of different user accounts
for each service
7. Prioritize Release-1 based on the above
 Prioritize based on the highest impact use case
 Back away from non-essential features

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Sleep machine example
Problem: Help people who live in noisy areas
to sleep better
Hypothesis: Customers would rather use their
iPhone than dedicated sleep
machines or alarm clocks
• 90+ Sounds Available
• Mix your own sleep tracks
• Beautiful digital clock
• Alarm with favorite songs
• Captures sleep data and analytics

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AGILE MVP PLANNING
1. Who are the users?
 Define user personas
2. What are “all” of the key features that I can think of?
 Identify the Epics
3. What is my objective for the MVP release?
 Document the hypothesis you are testing
4. Which Epics are required for my MVP?
 Prioritize Epics

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Epics in Pivotal tracker
Hint: Once entered you can drag and drop them to prioritize.

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AGILE MVP PLANNING
5. What do these prioritized features/epics need to do?
 Identify all of the user stories you can think of
 INVEST (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimated, Small,
Testable)
 Assign each one to an Epic or create new Epics
6. Is this story required to determine Problem/Solution Fit?
 MVP Test Every Story
7. How long will it take to develop my MVP
 Estimate “points” for each user story
 Estimate “capacity” for your development team

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Stories In Pivotal tracker
Hint: Once entered you can drag and drop them to prioritize.

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THE MVP TEST
Test each user story to determine if it belongs in the MVP
• Does it support the MVP hypothesis and objective?
• Is it essential to your primary use case?
• Is it essential to solving the highest value problem?
• Are your customers saying this is a “must have”?
• Focus on your “visionary” customers
• Don’t get dragged around by one or two vocal clients
• Can I fit it into a two-month development effort?
• How does it stack up against your other MVP priorities
• Draw a line in the sand for a release date and then cull what
doesn’t fit

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Writing user stories
• As a [Persona], I want to [capability or function],
so that [result or benefit]
• INVEST
• Independent
• Negotiable
• Valuable
• Estimated
• Small
• Testable

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AGILE MVP PLANNING
8. What should we work on next?
 Organize stories into 2-Week Sprints
 Groom each story with acceptance criteria
9. How are we doing?
 Sprint Demo Reviews after every Sprint
10. What if my priorities change?
 Every 2 weeks prioritize stories for the next sprint
 Take into account market feedback
Release, Get Feedback, Repeat

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Common MISTAKES
1. Include too many features; start new ones too soon
2. Lack timely visibility to development progress
3. Not quantitatively capturing feedback from users and
customers
4. Focused on “your solution” and not on “their problems”
5. Your development team is too optimistic leading to too
many commitments
6. Lack of a product roadmap leads to any client being a good
client
7. Chasing the competition

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summary
• Apply Lean Product Management & Development
Principles from Day 1
• Don’t over-engineer; get to MVP in two months or less
• Manage your priorities at the Epic level downward to
focus and save time in managing your backlog
• Your priorities and plan WILL change … Embrace it

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product/market fit
• Is this something (lots of) people want?
• How well does my product solve the problem?
• What value does it deliver over other alternatives?
• Will they pay for it?
• Qualitative Discovery
• Quantitative Discovery
Running Lean, Ash Maurya