We’re excited to announce this year’s Lean Startup Conference, December 8 – 12 in San Francisco. Tickets are on sale now, at the best price we’re offering this year, so we recommend registering today. But that’s not really what we’re here to talk about. Instead, we want to focus on the themes of the conference.
This year, we’re defining the conference program as a series of hard questions entrepreneurs commonly face, and we’ll address them in our talks and workshops. Below is our initial list of questions. We’d welcome your input on which of these challenges feel most vital to you, along with additional questions you and your team are facing. You can leave ideas in the comments or email Sarah Milstein, co-host for the conference and CEO of Lean Startups Productions.
Very soon, after we’ve refined this list, we’ll post our call for proposals from potential speakers, seeking talks that can answer the questions we’ve collected. [UPDATE: The call for proposals is now open.] If you’d like to learn when we open the call, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to this blog, or sign up for the newsletter on our site.
Questions we’re aiming to address at this year’s conference, by category:
Experiments and Process
- How can I ensure that meaningful customer feedback is included in our evaluation of new initiatives?
- How can I get new products, services, and internal initiatives to market more quickly?
- How can I design a good experiment--a minimum viable product--for services or internal customers?
- How can I create a sandbox for innovation with my organization without putting my core business in jeopardy?
- What can I do when a team proposes an experiment that might undermine our existing brand?
- How can I experiment and iterate quickly on mission-critical products and systems?
- How can I keep up team morale when experiments invalidate a lot of our ideas?
- What can I do when I have a handful of customers who absolutely love our new product, but not enough to meet our revenue or impact goals?
- How can I measure a new initiative before it has large numbers of customers or revenue?
- How can I measure a value hypothesis and a growth hypothesis at the same time?
- What metrics I can use to hold people accountable on projects that include extreme uncertainty?
- How can I measure impact when financial metrics are not the bottom line (or not the sole bottom), such as in NGOs, non-profits and governments?
- How can I convince my leaders and managers to support entrepreneurial methods?
- How can I convince my co-workers and direct reports to use entrepreneurial methods?
- How can I set up teams to ensure cross-functional collaboration?
- How can I get internal services like IT, finance, legal, and HR to act like startups and serve entrepreneurial teams throughout my organization?
- What does the culture of a high-performance, high-growth team look like?
- How can I build a culture that serves existing customers and unlocks new sources of growth?
- How can I best hire and train people who haven’t used Lean Startup methods before?
