Tristan Kromer on the Practice of Lean Startup

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Testing with Agile

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University of Virginia

Testing with Agile

255 ratings

Course 4 of 5 in the Specialization Agile Development

To deliver agile outcomes, you have to do more than implement an agile process; you have to create a culture of experimentation. It's this commitment to experimenting that's at the heart of a high-functioning practice of agile. This course shows you how to integrate the practice of experimentation across concept/feature testing, usability testing, and testing the software itself. Basically, you’ll learn how to answer these four big questions with experiments: 1. Should we build it? 2. Did it matter? 3. Is it usable? 4. Did it break? More specifically, after completing this course, you’ll be able to: - Identify where and how to invest your team’s scarce time and energy into better testing for maximum impact on outcomes - Coach your team on the relationship between idea, usability, and software testing to get the buy-in you need for strong interdisciplinary collaboration - Test ideas before you build them to avoid waste and help your team focus on what will really drive outcomes - Test alternative interface patterns before you build them to maximize both product usability and purposeful implementation As a Project Management Institute (PMI®) Registered Education Provider, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business has been approved by PMI to issue 20 professional development units (PDUs) for this course, which focuses on core competencies recognized by PMI. (Provider #2122) This course is supported by the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.

From the lesson

Should we build it? Did it matter?

Nothing will help a team deliver better outcomes like making sure they’re building something the user values. This might sound simple or obvious, but I think after this module it’s likely you’ll find opportunities to help improve your team’s focus by testing ideas more definitively before you invest in developing software. In this module you’ll learn how to make concept testing an integral part of your culture of experimentation. We’ll continue to apply the Lean Startup methods you learned in ‘Running Product Design Sprints’ (and/or you can review the tutorials in the Resources section). We’ll look at how high-functioning teams design and run situation-appropriate experiments to test ideas, and how that works before the fact (when you’re testing an idea) and after the fact (when you’re testing the value of software you’ve released).

Creating a Culture of Experimentation3:21

Meet the Companies - HVAC in a Hurry and Enable Quiz3:54

The Test Driven Practice of Agile Part 14:53

The Test Driven Practice of Agile Part 28:41

The Test Driven Practice of Agile Part 36:20

Test-Driven Proposition Design5:16

Recap on Lean Startup & Experimentation9:03

Tracking Hypotheses3:30

Tristan Kromer on the Practice of Lean Startup6:43

Tristan Kromer on Getting Started with Lean6:34

Tristan Kromer on Creating a Culture of Experimentation7:40

David Bland on the Practice of Lean Startup5:35

David Bland on Creating a Culture of Experimentation, Part 14:48

David Bland on Creating a Culture of Experimentation, Part 29:45

David Bland on Marrying Agile to Lean Startup7:41

Laura Klein on Creating a Culture of Experimentation10:42

Meet the Instructors

Alex Cowan
Faculty & Batten Fellow
Darden School of Business

I'm here with Tristan Kromer.

Tristan is a Lean Start-Up coach and long time practitioner of Lean Start-Up.

Thanks Tristan for joining us.

>> Thank you, it's always a pleasure to talk with you, Alex.

>> Likewise.

Let's talk about the practice of Lean Start-Up and

what's hard about doing Lean Start-Up in the real world?

>> So Lean Start-Up is always hard, there's nothing kind of easy about it.

Our minds are fundamentally biased against testing our own hypothesis.

As entrepreneurs, our job is to dream big and

to believe that we can conquer the world.

And engaging in any sort of innovative venture is ultimately a very strong risk

and there's a lot of economic reasons why you shouldn't do that.

Whether it's inside a large company, where you might be risking your nice cushy

job or whether you're just as a startup and you're risking your family's future.

You're taking on a big risk and

you have to believe in yourself in order to do that.

Now at the same time as a Lean Start-up practitioner,

we are asking you to not only to believe so

strongly in yourself that you are willing to risk yourself, your family, and

your financial future, but you also have to doubt yourself simultaneously.

You have to be skeptical about your own beliefs.

You have to be skeptical about your assumptions.

You have to test and validate and

invalidate every hypothesis that you can possibly come up with.

Like that's your job, is to be skeptical and so to simultaneously hold those

two view points together is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance that is

inherently uncomfortable and now you have to do that with your home team.

You have to accept the fact that your, perhaps you're the product manager and

your engineer's saying, I don't know if I should implement that feature in.

And now you're getting nothing but insubordination in letting your team, but

that's part of the job.

You have to accept that and say, okay I accept that you disagree.

Let's together design a test that will establish which one of

our opinions is actually true, that's our job.

And I used to work with Janice Frazier, who is I think one of my mentors.

And one of the people I most respect in this world.

And we absolutely fought when I worked for her,

because I would be constantly challenging her and that was very uncomfortable for

her, even though when I came to her and I was working on my own startup,

she would be the one that would be challenging me.

And we all have this problem, even Earl Chris has it's own assumption in biasism

and we all have to rely on the uncomfortable nature of people

challenging and doubting and asking us to test and doubted our assumptions.

That is not easy and it's just something you have to live with.

[LAUGH] >> And when you go into work with a team

say, are there certain things that kind of signal to you, okay this is going to be

tricky, and we're going to have to work through or fix this or that?

And certain things that signal to you, okay this is pretty good,

the runway is clear for these folks to initiate the practice of Lean Start-up.

>> Yeah so, philosophical agreement is definitely number one.

You have to agree on what your job as a start-up is.

So as start up, we're not executing.

We're not executing on a known business model where we can predict

the future four years out.

And have it all nice in a spreadsheet.

We are fundamentally trying to discover a new business model.

And that means our job is to produce knowledge,

to learn about what, who are our customers?

What should our value proposition be?

What are the key resources we need to create this value proposition?

So we need to agree that our job is to produce knowledge and anything we're not

doing, anything that we do that doesn't produce knowledge, even if it's necessary

like taking out the trash, doing the taxes, that's not pushing us forward.

Writing lines of code is not pushing us forward.

Deciding on five pixels versus four pixels, rounded corners on our homepage,

that's not moving us forward.

Are we engaging in activities that produce knowledge about our business model or not?

If you can't get the team to agree that,

that is their job then you can't make any progress with Lean Start-up.

So you must have that agreement whether you're a start-up,

if you're inside a larger company and you're trying to do this.

That also includes your major stakeholders.

They also have to engage in the act of have to believe

that progress is defined by creating knowledge.

>> And when you're actually doing this,

what specific practices do you find are most effective and durable?

>> There are a lot of different practices that you can engage in.

A lot of different Lean Start-up methods such as building a landing page,

tools like Business Model Canvas, and so on and so forth.

I tend to be not very dogmatic.

I think there's a lot of different ways you can go and approach these things.

If you want to use Scrum to manage your projects, that's fine.

If you want to use Kanban, that's fine.

If you want to use Business Model Canvas, that's fine.

It you want to use the Lean Canvas, it's not my favorite, but go ahead.

The most important thing is really that you have a goal and

that you're making progress in a systematic way forward.

You're building a habit and a culture of experimentation.

So, I do recommend that teams are at least trying to create one experiment per week,

even if it's a very small experiment.

You need to have a habit.

I have a lot of plants in my house, I have to water them every week.

There's one plant that I have to water once a month.

I always forget to water that one, right?

Because it's so intermittent, so we want to have this weekly habit of getting

together, debriefing our experiment results, planning the next experiment and

doing a retrospective.

Let's generate that habit of feeling bad when we haven't performed an experiment,

feeling bad when we haven't come back with knowledge.

And now let's do a little retrospect and say how could we have done that better?

Could we have run that seven day experiment in six days.?

Could our results be a little bit better, are we doing our customers interviews

correctly, are we asking leading questions, is our smoke test correct, or

is our landing page taking account for margin of error?

So if we can make one little tweak to our methodology itself every week,

even if it's something very small like that, then ultimately your practice of

Lean Start-up is improving and you're going to get better at it,

you're going to get more results, you're going to get more results faster.

>> That's some great advice and

perspective on the practice of Lean Start-up in the real world.

Thank you, Tristan.

>> Thank you, Alex.

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