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.
