Perspectives

PERSPECTIVES is a forum where I write about my professional experiences, opinions and interests. Most everything here is in some way connected to the broad and ever evolving realms of Design and Product Development.

Here I solidify and strengthen my own experiences and learnings, writing and offering commentary fully unique and opinionated...These are my perspectives. I hope that as I experience, learn and write, I can also inspire you in some way...and if nothing else, at least stimulate interesting conversation.

Hey man, it's like, a blog.

Day 1

Everyone met at the Alley NYC, a coworking space in Times Square, Friday evening over pizza and conversation. Soon after, people who brought product ideas had 50 seconds each to pitch to everyone in the room. After the pitches, everyone had 3 votes and the top 10-15 ideas were chosen – people then formed teams. I didn’t get an exact count, but I estimate that there were 12-14 teams in total.

I decided to join a team working on a product to create a program for 4th year undergrad students entering the professional workforce to join a recognized and visible industry rotational program.

Immediately we began to explore the idea by subjecting it to the Validation Board. We first identified our customer hypothesis (4th year undergrads) and problem hypothesis (students are ill-prepared to find the right job fit). We recorded our assumptions, chose which assumption we believed to be the riskiest and then our team agreed upon validation criteria for our assumption. As it was late in the evening, we decided to save the in-person interviews for Saturday but sent out a survey, leveraging twitter (#college).

Lean Startup Machine is a movement aimed to educate entrepreneurs and industry professionals alike on how to build products that people actually want. Using Lean Startup methodology, LSM is a 3-day workshop where 50 people gather, pitch ideas for a product and teams form around those pitches. At the end of the weekend, winning teams are chosen based on how well each team adhered to the process and how they were able to handle change throughout the journey. Teams are not judged on how marketable or creative a product idea is. Although many people who attend the workshop were entrepreneurs, I participated interested in the methodology and how it can be applied in enterprise situations. Also, LSM is NOT a hackathon. I was actually surprised to see that a majority of the participants were not developers but come from another discipline within tech or even different industries.

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adam good

PERSPECTIVES

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Perspectives

Lean Startup Machine NYC: Part 2 - My Experience

Lean Startup Machine NYC: April 12 – 14, 2013

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