3. FROSTHUB
Organizational Design, Product Strategy and Software
Design Consultancy
Bootstrapped Startup - Operations Management Software
Founded in 2010
Team of 5+ - Average 15 years of experience in software
industry
Partnerships
4. LEAN STARTUP AND AGILE
METHODS
How to create an information system that provides value to your customers?
History
Lean Principles developed byToyota
Learning and Continuous Improvement
Extreme programming by IBM
Customer Development methodology - Steve Blank
6. “True startup productivity is not just making more stuff, but
systematically figuring out the right things to build” - Eric Ries
7. WHAT IS A STARTUP?
A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a
new product or service under conditions of extreme
uncertainty.
Treat your information systems project as a
startup - be entrepreneurial
9. WHAT IS LEAN STARTUP?
• It asks people to start measuring their productivity
differently.
• Startups often accidentally build something nobody wants,
it doesn’t mater much if they do it on time and on budget.
• Goal of a startup
• Figure out the right thing to build - customers want and
pay for - as quickly as possible.
10. ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS
MANAGEMENT
• Our goal is to create an institution, not just a product
• Traditional management practices fail
• Need practices and principles geared to the startup
context of extreme uncertainty
11. VALIDATE LEARNING
Process of demonstrating empirically that a team has
discovered valuable truths about a startup’s present and
future business prospects.
Real customers
Empirical data - source of knowledge is acquired by
means of observation and experimentation
Get out of the office
12. EXAMPLES
• Will people listen to music privately in public setting?
• Will people pay for music online?
• Will people share their personal moments in a public portal?
• Will people share their dating interests publicly?
Validate hypothesis about customer behavior
13. THINK BIG, START SMALL
Zappos
• Is there sufficient demand for and superior online
shopping experience for shoes?
• Built a product (smoke and mirrors) - tested it - learned
14. VALUEVS.WASTE
• Which of our efforts are value-creating and which are
wasteful?
• Lean thinking - defines value as providing benefit to the
customers; anything else is waste.
• Wrong Assumptions - go down a wasteful path
without validation
15. HYPOTHESISTESTS
• Value Hypothesis - tests whether a product or service
really delivers value to customers once they are using it.
• Growth Hypothesis - test how new customers will
discover a product or service
18. PITFALLS
• You test the wrong thing
• You do this when you misunderstand the real problem
• Your MVP is bloated
• Don’t build a thing in the beginning
• You don’t define any success metrics
• take any positive signals as validation
• You are asking the wrong questions
• You didn’t pivot properly
23. MINIMUMVIABLE PRODUCT
• THE “MVP”
The smallest amount of work you can do to
validate your assumptions.
• Not always a product
• Not what you are going to sell with minimal features
34. WE LEARNED
• Some MVPs were bloated
• We didn’t do enough exploration or concierge
experiments
• We have built too much functionality that is not valuable
to the users
• Needed to shorten our build-measure-learn cycles
35. CUSTOMERTESTING
• Test with people you didn’t know before
• Users will always think they need something more
• Finding early adopters
• Continuing the conversations and co-design