en: The Lean Startup Experience

I saw an infographic asking if we are getting into another “dot com” bubble. That infographic was built by Udemy, great job. I agree with that, and I believe we have better tools and techniques today to help companies to play in startup mode.

One of the things we surely need to focus on is the concept “Lean Startup“. Lots of ways to describe can be found. My way, as an eXtreme Programming and Agile practitioner is to think about a real way to help companies to leverage products to a real experience. With real software engineering + marketing and customer development practices.

But… delivering fast is not enough. Actually it never was! We need to understand who is caring about what is delivered. We need to measure not only progress with real software, but measure how are our clients enjoying the experience during the process. So yes, we have to speak to final users, get feedback, understand what are they looking for. They know the next killer feature of your product. True.

So playing with startups and lean startups is about building experiments and testing ideas and learning from those experiences. Really about learning.

Having that in place, we can grow ideas. I like that term. It’s not about building ideas. But actually grow them.

Last week of June/2011 during Agile Brazil 2011 I’ve done a workshop called “From vision to production”, where I was focused on talking to people about techniques teams using Agile Methodologies like Lean and eXtreme Programming to deliver products and features can use. How do you know if those features are the top ones?

During the practice, I’ve challenged teams to understand about how to build something that can be used to test the idea. Not tested by some xUnit framework, but tested by the market. If possible not even using a real software but using simple tools like a survey, interviews and paper prototyping.

Simple and small experiments that can help a team to learn faster. And prepare it to the next experiment. One of them may result in a software. One of them may result in many new users. One of them may take the company to a next level.

The whole thing is not about getting rich or getting money in a easy way. You know why?

One of those experiments may shutdown your idea, and “help you” to move to some other venture. But, how long would that take? One week? A Month? One whole year?

The thing is about failing as fast as possible, so you can pivot, so you can change direction, plan again, and try again.

Getting to the end…

This post was about sharing things I’m playing a lot.
I’m helping a product to grow for seven months now, since its official launch.
It’s not easy. But it can be fun.

And the “experiences” I will share here, will be related also to other ideas I will help to grow.

Failure is expected. Always. But I’m not about winning all the time (although it’s very good).
I’m about learning.
And you should be too. 🙂

So, to finish “The Lean Startup Experience” post, we should think about a song…

Hey Yo (The pivot song :-))
Hey Yo, where you goin’ with that idea in your head?
Hey Yo, I said, where you goin’ with that idea in your head?
I’m goin’ down to shut my old one baby
I caught her metrics and they are poor man
I’m goin’ down to start a new one baby
I’ll start messin’ round again

* Any relation with The Jimi Hendrix Experience… is that I’m a left handed guitar player too. Just that. \o/