Lean Startup Week: Seven Days of Focused Innovation Training

Guest post by Jennifer Maerz, Contributing Editor of Lean Startup Co. 

We’re excited to announce that we’re doing something radically different with our flagship event this year. Gone is the Lean Startup Conference as you know it. Welcome instead Lean Startup Week, October 31 - November 6, 2016.

And what is this Lean Startup Week? It is seven days of thought-provoking programming around the things you love — Lean Startup training, specific case studies, hands-on workshops, industry networking dinners, inspiring speakers, and speed mentoring sessions — plus brand new partner events. That’s right. We’re inviting the big names in entrepreneurship to help curate workshops and activities. For example, Techstars is leading a two-day MVP bootcamp, a.k.a Startup Weekend, designed to amp your rapidfire build-measure-learn process as part of Lean Startup Week. (If you’re interested in producing a session or small event related to entrepreneurship during Lean Startup Week, pitch us your ideas at editorial@leanstartup.co.)

We’re bringing in a new mix of speakers and mentors from the Fortune 500, startup, and mission-based org worlds. These are industry leaders you haven’t heard at our conferences before and who you won’t hear anywhere else. We have lots of exciting announcements about Lean Startup Week speakers that we’re bursting to tell you about — like General Stanley McChrystal, the retired four-star general who has a remarkable record of achievements. He’ll share what he’s learned from his time in the military about how to improve organizational performance, cultivate an adaptable team, and scale management to meet the biggest challenges facing an organization.

You’ll also hear from IBM’s head of design Phil Gilbert, who was recently profiled in the New York Times Magazine for introducing the world’s largest information technology company to the concept of design thinking. Design thinking is a philosophy so complementary to Lean Startup we’re excited to include more programming dedicated to it as part of Lean Startup Week.

And we’re thrilled to welcome Matt Brimer, who co-founded General Assembly as a community for entrepreneurs and has grown it into a global education company. He also happens to be the founder of the super hot pre-work dance party, Daybreaker.

Plus we’ll hear from Michael Perry, CEO of virtual marketing assistant Kit, who gave an amazing impromptu presentation at 2015’s Startup Tours, and Tatyana Mamut, Head of Design & UX at Salesforce (and ex-IDEO), who will lead an interactive conversation on driving product innovation.

We’re also offering strategic learning tracks so you can focus on programming built to match your skill set, objectives, type of business (startup versus enterprise), and level of experience more closely than ever before. Those of you who’ve been with us for years say you want more concrete sessions dedicated to long term strategies and advanced practice discussions, while you newbies are anxious for hands-on classes and fresh case studies to get you started. For those looking to mix-and-match between levels and develop new skills, we’ll also have a DIY track that allows you to schedule your sessions accordingly.

Lean Startup Week will be centrally located at San Francisco’s new, state of the art Pier 27. Workshop classrooms are big enough to fit everyone who’s eager to learn from our esteemed mentors. And we’ll have dedicated areas for catching up on work and networking — because we know how important those IRL alliances with other members of the global Lean Startup community have become to you. This is your chance for a solid week of Lean Startup training that matches your needs and skill level. It’s your opportunity to stay current with all the leading business tools that foster innovation. And it’s your chance to come together with a tight knit community dedicated to cracking the toughest challenges around rapid risk-taking. You’ll leave ready to apply the principles you’ve learned with us in your workplace, introduce the concepts to your team, and build successful products for the long term.

And hey, don’t just take our word for it. Below are a few testimonials from previous Lean Startup Conference attendees about their experience learning with us:

“Prior to attending the conference we were trying to balance doing customer discovery and working on new problems while also serving our existing customers. Innovation accounting helped us understand the need to dedicate folks to these types of initiatives. As a result we’ve been able to iterate much more quickly, and overcome some of the executive fear of releasing something into the wild in an MVP state.” — Andrea Hill, product strategist and UX consultant at ReadyTalk  

“During the conference I asked tons of questions during the after-hours 1-on-1 sessions with experts, and received direct feedback from Eric Ries on the final day. Since then we've designed three new products that came directly from customer feedback and are proving popular in initial testing.” — Emmanuel Eleyae, co-founder at Satin Lined Caps (SLAPS) Stockton, CA 

“The Lean Startup Conference has been instrumental to helping my team, one unit within a large organization, stay innovative. I’ve had my team attend the past three years.” — Darin Foster, director of product at Disney 

So what do you think? Wanna join us this Oct. 31-Nov. 6? Check out more information about Lean Startup Week here. We’ll have lots more big announcements in the weeks to come.