Lean at NYU ITP

1. Class 1 / 12
January 26, 2015
Jen van der Meer | jd1159 at nyu dot edu
Josh Knowles | chasing at spaceship dot com
LEAN
AT NYU ITP
Rockets Sketches borrowed from Harry Allen Design

2. 6:30 – 7:20
Course overview
7:20- 8:00
Quick concept descriptions business model canvas exercises
8:00 – 8:15
Break
8:15 – 9 ish
Guest Speaker: Tammy Kwan, Cognitive Toy Box
TODAY:

3. Jen van der Meer, Adjunct Professor at ITP since 2008
ITP courses + workshops: Bodies and Buildings, Products Tell Their
Stories, ITP VC Pitchfest, Reason Street, Angel Investor, Health Data
Challenges, Judge for startup competitions, + SVA PoD
Josh Knowles, ITP ’07
15+ years as an independent developer/consultant, working with
numerous brands and start-up clients (currently under the aegis of
Frescher-Southern, Ltd.)
ITP TEACHING TEAM

4. @CHASING

5. @JENVANDERMEER

6. LEAN
OUR APPROACH

7. LEAN AT NYU ITP

8. We embrace a creative, iterative, and collaborative
approach to making things -- but launching a product out
into the world takes a somewhat different set of skills.
How do we make sure people want to use what they
make?
How do we create a business plan to support the idea?
Is the idea strong enough to turn into a job -- or a career?
LEAN AT NYU ITP

9. Experiential course in entrepreneurship
Informed by Steve Blank’s Lean Launchpad and the NYU
Summer Launchpad Accelerator,
We are applying the curriculum developed at Stanford and
Berkeley for the ITP culture and NYU community.
This course has been developed with support from the
NYU Entrepreneurship Initiative, and aims to mix the best
of the methods from the Lean Launchpad methodology with
the best of ITP's culture and practice.
BEST OF BOTH

10. 10
THE ONLY TEXTBOOK WE READ:

11. 11

12. 12

13. .
ITERATIVE SEARCH FOR A BUSINESS MODEL
Students work in self-formed teams of 3-4 to develop their
business model and product/service over the course of the
semester.
The focus of the course is the work of:
Customer development, speaking directly to potential
customers to help define opportunities that the startup is
designed to solve. We’ll go deeper into design approaches
to understanding through empathy.
Agile development: utilizing UX methods and tools to
ground teams in an understanding of how to launch a
minimally viable product.

14. CLASS TIMEFRAME AND
EXPECTATIONS

15. .
CLASS TIMEFRAME AND CADENCE
Walk through the full canvas
Build to MVP, space for iteration

16. .
CLASS TIMEFRAME 2015
2/2
Business Models
Customer Development
2/9
Value Proposition
Research tools
2/16
President’s Day
2/23
Customer Segments
Research Tools
3/23
Spring Break
3/9
Customer Relationships
Product Development
3/23
Resources
Activities + Costs
3/30
Product Development
UX and User Interface
Design
4/6
UI UX Part 2
4/13
Product Development
User test
4/20
Product development
4/27
Product MVP
May!
Delicious Celebration
Lessons Learned
3/2
Revenue Streams
Distribution Channels

17. TEACHERS
MENTORS
AND ADVISORS

18. MENTOR ROLE
• Mentors play an active role in weekly coaching of a specific team of 3-4 students. The role of the
mentors is to help the teams test their business model hypotheses, and .
• Offer teams strategic guidance and wisdom:
 Offer business model suggestions
 Identify gaps in the team’s business knowledge and suggest areas of inquiry and
customer development that can help address those gap
 Guide you through a pivot
• Provide teams with tactical guidance every week:
 Review teams’ weekly presentation before they present in person or over
skype/hangout
 Comment weekly on teams’ project blog
 Respond to the teaching team’s critique of their team
 Offer network help: “Why don’t you call x? Let me connect you” but their job is not to build your
network for you
 Coach the teams to make 5 to 10 customer contacts/week
 Check in with teaching team twice over the semester to discuss student progress

19. TEACHERS, MENTORS AND ADVISORS
• Why we are doing this? We all see this class as an opportunity to
help the startup ecosystem of NYU, and NYC
• Teachers are here to provide guidance and support and ensure
you can grasp the practice of customer development and agile
development, and get to an MVP
• Mentors have volunteered to coach a specific team – and provide
guidance with business model development, and prioritizing
features for the MVP
• Advisors have volunteered to be on hand to answer your
questions, provide specific expertise, and connect you to who you
need to know
• Some have experience in Lean, others are here to learn more
about lean and contribute

20. MENTORS + TEAMS
Team matchup for next week
John Krasnodebski, Shutterstock
John Bachir, Medstro
Sarah Krasley @sarahkrasley
Autodesk, Sustainability, Berkeley

21. WHAT TO EXPECT OF MENTORS
• Proactively set up office hours here or at their convenience
• Mentors are available to help you through the work of determining
your business model, working through the business model canvas
• Mentors will help connect you to people you need to meet during
customer development (but this responsibility is ultimately yours)
• Later on in the semester, as you continue customer development
but move forward to launch an MVP, mentors are there to coach
you through timing, priorities, and pacing
• They are coaches, but not minders – you have to do the work of
orchestrating to fit into their schedules

22. WHAT TO EXPECT OF ADVISORS
• Advisors are likely time constrained, but eager to help
• Advisors are available for counsel and advisory, and connections
• We’ll publish a contact list but lean on us to make the first intro
and set context, as each advisor has their unique perspective and
constraints for availability
• Advisors based in NYC will come to the Lessons Learned day at
the end of the semester

23. WHAT TO EXPECT OF TEACHERS
• We are here to help – reach out whenever you need it within
reason.
• Office hours Jen: 5-6 on Mondays, (but schedule) or schedule
time at my office in Meatpacking: jd1159 at nyu dot edu
• Josh office hours: 5-6 on Mondays

24. WHAT WE EXPECT FROM YOU
• Humility
• Ask for help
• Tell us who you need to meet with – someone here knows the
person you need to find
• Motivation to try your hand at entrepreneurship
• Look at the videos, they are short
• Get the book, it’s a nice book to have, and it has drawings
• At least 5 interview with customers, per week
• (Last year every team did way more than that)
• Flexibility and collaboration working on a buildable MVP

25. SHORT HISTORY OF A
MOVEMENT

26. .
WHAT IS A BUSINESS MODEL?
A business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates,
delivers, and captures value… for companies, customers, and society
Business model canvas : can become a shared language that allows you to
easily describe and manipulate models to create new strategic alternatives
Described through 9 basic building blocks that show the logic of how a
company intends to make money
Business Model Generation
Alexander Osterwalder

27. BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS
Who are
our key
partners?
What key
activities do our
value
propositions
require?
What key
resources do
our value
propositions
require?
Which one of
our customers
problems are
we helping to
solve?
What needs
are met?
What is the
product/service
?
How will we get
keep and grow
customers?
Through which
channels do
our customer
segments wish
to be reached?
For whom are
we solving a
problem /
needs met
Who are the
customers
Does the value
proposition
match the need
Single sided or
multimarket?
CONCEPT HERE
What are the most important costs in
our business model?
What is the revenue model? What are
our pricing tactics? For what value
are customers willing to pay?

28. THE SHIFT – FROM PUSH AND MARKET TO
CUSTOMER DEVELOPMENT
28
The Four Steps to the Customer Epiphany by Steve Blank

29. The Customer Development
process changes the way
startups are built
Startups are not smaller
versions of large companies
A startup as a “temporary
organization designed to
search for a repeatable and
scalable business model”
• Co-founded 8 startups.
• 1996: E.piphany
• 1998: $3.4 MM sales
• 1999: IPO raised $72 MM
• Author of Four Steps to the Epiphany, Startup
Owner’s Manual
FIRST CAME STEVE

30. Continuous customer
interaction
A startup is an experiment
A hypothesis to be tested
Assume customer and
features are unknowns
Low burn by design
Are we on the path to a
sustainable business• Founded IMVU
• Parallels between Lean and Agile, caught fire in
the startup community for software businesses,
particularly mobile and SaaS models.
THEN CAME ERIC

31. 31
WHAT CAME BEFORE STEVE AND ERIC
Lean Manufacturing
Total Quality
Management
Kanban
Continuous
Improvement
Agile

32. 32
WHAT CAME BEFORE STEVE AND ERIC

33. The Kanban Method respects the human condition. People resist
change for emotional reasons. When change affects their self-image,
self-esteem, or position with a social group, people will resist and the
resistance will be emotional.
The Kanban Method adopts the Zen Buddhism concept that "water
goes around the rock." Hence, it focuses on changes that can be made
without invoking emotional resistance, while visualization and limiting
work-in-progress raise awareness of deeper issues allowing for an
emotional engagement that helps to overcome resistance.
Now take a deep, cleansing breath. Again.
33
KANBAN

34. 34
AGILE AND LEAN INFLUENCES
DESIGN RESEARCH
(Ethnography)
DESIGN THINKING
(IDEO, Dschool)

35. We’ll work on integrating design thinking practices
Deeper UX methods
Ethnography, particularly participant observation
Customer interview techniques
To get us deeper into unmet needs, latent and hidden needs
Over the course of the semester
And contributing back to how Lean LaunchPad evolves
35
LEAN IS NEW AS A MOVEMENT, AND IS EVOLVING

36. NEXT:
CANVAS WORKSHOP
GUEST SPEAKER:
TAMMY KWAN
COGNITIVE TOY BOX

37. FOR NEXT WEEK

38. .
STEP 1: CUSTOMER DISCOVERY
Customer discovery translates a founding team’s vision for the company into a
hypothesis about each component of the business model and creates a set of
experiments to test each hypothesis.
Customer discovery is not about collecting features lists from prospective
customers or running lots of focus groups.
The founders define the product vision and
then use customer discovery to find
customers and a market for that vision.
-Steve Blank, The Startup Owner’s Manual

39. Total
addressable
market
Total addressable: how big is the universe?
Served available market: how many can I reach with my sales channel?
Target market: who will be the most likely buyers?
Served
available
market
Target
market
ESTIMATE YOUR TOTAL ADDRESSABLE MAKRET

40. .
NEXT WEEK PREP:
Alexandar Osterwalder on Business Model Canvas Video
Read: Business Model Generation pp. 14-49.
Video Lecture: Value Proposition
Talk to at least 5 potential customers. Post first discovery narratives on your
team blog.

41. .
NEXT WEEK PRESENTATION:
Prepare a presentation – guidelines below:
· Cover slide
· Latest version Business Model Canvas with changes marked
· Market size (TAM, SAM, Target Market)
Total addressable: how big is the universe
Served available market: how many can I reach with my sales channel?
Target market: who will be the most likely buyers?
· Propose experiments to test your value proposition. What constitutes a
pass/fail signal for each
test?