Lean Startup is Alive in the Enterprise !— 8 Stories from the I/O Podcast

50+ enterprise innovators shared their stories in Season 2

The Econic Team
Jul 27, 2017 · 6 min read

“What Lean Startup has brought us is a different way of doing innovation. It has allowed us to speed up innovation cycles and do more with less. We are able to test 50% more ideas. “

Susana Jurado, Telefonica R&D

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Q: Have you found any advantages to being in the Midwest and trying to adopt Lean Startup for innovation?
“At its most basic form is the Midwest niceties. It’s so basic and important that you get out and talk to customers early and often as part of the Lean Startup process. Our customers are typically very nice and open to talking with us. They’re open to describing their problems and helping us empathize. People know that our employees and friendly and have farming backgrounds, so they can relate.

The other thing is I don’t think we’re disadvantaged by being in the Midwest. We’re just as innovative as the coast, we just get a bad wrap because we don’t have a Facebook that’s located in the Midwest. I think that it won’t be long before John Deere has more traction with Lean Startup and then people will be saying ‘Hey, John Deere is in the Midwest, they’re innovative, and they’re using Lean Startup well.’”

Eric Shulz, John Deere Lean Startup Coach

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“In the past, I’d get my big thick 30-page business plan and all the requirement documents and maybe we’d cut stuff out and that was ‘lean’, but now we have a whole different way of approaching ‘should things actually be built?’.

Josh Berry, Econic’s Managing Partner

“I’ve been doing user-centered design for many many years and I would say about 10 years ago I started to really see a switch. Previously, we’d talk about ‘getting insights from users!’ and ‘doing user research!’ and we’d been doing that for years and that would get a lot of pushback. About 10 years ago that started to shift and people started to understand that it was important. I think Lean Startup really did an amazing job of accelerating that. The biggest change I’ve seen in the last few years is how it’s been applied to enterprise and business transformation.

Laura Klein, Author “UX for Lean Startups”

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“I think we’re lucky. I think we have an amazing CEO. Richard Fairbanks has said we’re going to become a technology company and to do that requires x, y, and z and it requires a whole other vernacular of x, y and z that we don’t know about. We have millions of customers and even more data on them, so let’s all use those experiences and our technology to change banking for good. (Richard Fairbanks) gave us the go-ahead to become a technology company.

Having our leader say ‘this is who we’re going to become’ and empowering people to go out and make it happen is kind of a gift.”

Amee Mungo, Capital One, on how to implement Lean Startup

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https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inside-outside-innovation/id1105487293?mt=2

Q: How do you help companies focus on understanding their customers’ problems?

“ One of my clients has been around a long time and we decided to train all 10 of their feature teams on these processes. It’s interesting, you tend to see a natural bell curve with people at the top who totally get it, have the skills, excited to learn, ready to get out of the building, and the people towards the bottom who want to hear the talk again because they aren’t getting the concepts.

It’s important to acknowledge that there are different levels of skill and buy-in. Among your team, identify the people with the highest skill and highest buy-in. We stacked the deck and made one ‘Dream Team’ and gave them the most important project that called for a lot of customer centric design. Some of the other teams didn’t adopt processes as much, but this team did and they created an innovative product that delighted customers and got a lot of positive press. We used that as a role model, as a champion to say to the rest of the company ‘See, if you adopt these principles, you can achieve similar results.’. It helped bring people up and adopt it.”

Dan Olson, Author of “Lean Product Playbook”, on getting the enterprise to adopt Lean Startup

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“The things that we have learned by embracing Lean have saved us thousands of hours in development work and countless taxpayer dollars. We really are a lot more confident that we’re building the right thing. It’s never perfect, but we’re a lot more confident that we’re solving real taxpayer needs. It’s hard and it’s really rewarding. If the IRS can do it, you can too.”

IRS Lean Startup Team, on how the IRS acts like a Lean Startup

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“…but we spend the other half of the time trying to figure out how to actually put it into practice. The big question always is ‘who is allowed to talk to customers and who is actually going to do it?’. Everyone knows they need to do it but everyone thinks it’s the other person’s job.”

Ash Maurya, Author “Running Lean” & “Scaling Lean”, on the obstacles to implementing Lean Startup in the enterprise

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More about Inside/Outside Innovation podcast

The Inside/Outside Innovation podcast is an inside look at startups and innovation outside the Valley. It has highlighted startup and corporate Innovators from around the world and explores the ins and outs of innovation with raw stories, real insights, and tactical advice from the best and brightest in startups & innovation. Each week the podcast brings you the latest thinking in Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Corporate Venture Capital and more. With nearly 100 episodes, the Inside/Outside Innovation podcast has been named among the 10 Best Podcasts for Designers & Innovators by Inc. Magazine.

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The Econic Team

Written by

Startup-Driven Innovation. We help connect startups & enterprises to accelerate innovation (@josh_berry @shephardux) http://econic.co

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