How to (better) teach Lean Startup
Those are my notes from a session with Justin Wilcox on How to Teach Lean, during the Lean Startup Circle unconference in San Francisco 2016
Framing the session
Being introduced as a Lean Startup ‘teacher’ to startup founders is not a great start. Founders do start company because they want autonomy, impact or freedom. A teacher is not what they are looking for. So, how to re-frame the session to make sure it’s productive? Maybe instead of thinking of founder as students, think of founders as customers.
“Customer don’t buy products, they buy solutions to they problems.” — Justin Wilcox
Now ask the participants/customers what problems do they have, what are their challenges? Based on their inputs, structure the sessions to include the Lean tools that will help them with their challenges.
Before a session I used to ask for expectations but asking for problems provides concrete material to work on. My goal really is not to meet expectations but to help the participants with their problem.
Justin used Think-Pair-Share to creates safety for participants to share:
- Think: take 2 minutes to individually think about problems
- Pair: take 2 minutes (times 2) to share one of those problem with another person
- Share: each individual share their problem with the rest of the group
Once done, all the problems the participants are known to rest of the group. You can now focus the session, not on teaching but on working the problems of your customers.
Teach the value of customer interview
The value of customer interview is not obvious to first time founders. So instead of trying to convince founders to interviews customers, push them in the direction they want do go, as fast as possible and then ask them to do interviews. For instance, Justin does the “60 minutes to launch”, where participants spend 1 hours to create a landing page with a video and payment system that takes orders.
Once ready, well, suggest to go talk to customers for 1 hour! Justin says that usually when team comes back they understand that their offer is not what the customers want.
In B2B, we don’t want to make promises we can’t keep. So the “60-minute to launch” should be used to get sign up to a pilot program that aims at solving a specific problem, suggested Joshua Seiden
Teach how to do customer interviews
After explaining the basic rules of customer interview (don’t talk about tour product, never ask about the future), show them how interview are done. Live. For this Justin setup a task on mTurk.com and have someone call him directly. He then do a 1o minute interview for everyone to hear and understand… ha… that’s how you do interviews…
Here is how Justin uses mTurk.com for interviews
You can get the slides here: http://gettalk.at/teachlean
A great session with rich learning. Thank you Justin.
