Schedule
Day 1 21st April
Workshops
Day one starts with an immersive full day workshop. We have four workshops on offer, on a variety of topics. The workshop starts at 9:00, ending around 17:00. Included will be catered lunch & tea/coffee breaks.
Alistair Croll
Author of 'Lean Analytics'
Lean Analytics: Using Data to Build a Better Business Faster SOLD OUT
At the core of Lean Startup approaches is a continuous cycle of measurement and learning. But what should you measure?
To find the right metric, you need to understand the stage you’re at and the business model you’re in, as well as where to draw the line so you know when to cut your losses—and when to step on the gas.
This is an 8-hour workshop (including breaks) aimed at startups, medium-to-large enterprise and government attendees.
This session is based on the sold-out all-day workshop that has been run at every Lean Startup conference so far.
Martina Hodges Schell & Mary Baldwin
Pivotal Labs
The *official* Leader's Guide workshop developed in partnership with Eric Ries SOLD OUT
Since his record-breaking Kickstarter campaign in March of this year, Eric Ries has been hard at work assembling the Lean Startup Leader's Guide — the first-ever collection of the techniques and lessons he has learned first-hand from GE, Intuit, and dozens of other Lean Startups. This is the official Leader's Guide workshop developed in partnership with Eric Ries.. A hands-on (and minds-on) set of nine working sessions that activate most important lessons from the book.
Cindy Alvarez
Director of UX at Yammer, Microsoft
Customer Development: That’s Not What Your Customer Meant SOLD OUT
“Getting out of the building” is a great first step. But to some degree, what we hear and observe is what we want to. Confirmation biases are our brains’ hacks for assimilating the millions of pieces of information we encounter each minute. But they are an obstacle to rigorously invalidating our hypotheses!
Day 2 22nd April
Conference
On day two we kick off our conference. This is a chance to pick and choose your sessions along two parallel tracks.
Registration
Register for the conference and network with your fellow delegates
Welcome
A few words of welcome and a preview of what to expect from the day.
Opening Keynote: Just Evil Enough
Alistair Croll
Author of 'Lean Analytics'
Modern marketers know that attention is the scarcest resource. These days, it's not about whether you can build something—it's about whether anyone will care. Every great startup has a skeleton in their closet, because in some moment of desperation, they found a way to make the system work for them. They found the marketing equivalent of a zero-day exploit, and it's why they won. Join entrepreneur and best-selling author Alistair Croll as he lifts the covers on marketing's dark tactics, urging us to stop writing press releases, start hacking markets, and be just evil enough.
keynote analytics growth hacking metrics
Break
Lean Startup lessons from Pearson
Chris Locke
Product Lifecycle at Pearson
Chris will be sharing experiences from implementing Lean Startup successfully in a large organisation with their award-winning innovation programme
Experiment Design for Lean Startups
Bob Jansen &
Robbert van Geldrop
Startup founders often struggle to get going with Lean Startup. Firmhouse has been specializing in the craft of designing the right experiments and prioritizing on the riskiest parts of your startup business. Bob and Robbert are both entrepreneurs and are enrolled as mentors in many Dutch accelerators, incubators and such. We've been specializing in Experiment Design for Lean Startup throughout the years. The presentation sketches a path from Customer Discovery to Confirmation Experiments to an MVP.
This talk will cover: A complete overview of possible experiments startup founders can execute to test their ideas and assumptions, learning how to prioritize and how to design a suitable experiment and examples from other startups straight from Bob & Robbert's practice as mentors.
- A complete overview of possible experiments startup founders can execute to test their ideas and assumptions.
- Learning how to prioritize and how to design a suitable experiment.
- Examples from other startups straight from Bob & Robbert's practice as mentors.
experiments MVP customer development
Maintaining Continuous Learning Under Pressure
Simon Phillips &
Rosemary King
This joint presentation by Pivotal Labs Product Manager Rosemary King, and UX Designer Simon Phillips will explore why up front investment in Discovery and Framing set up a project on solid foundation, how to react when unknown unknowns throw off the product plan, how to involve development teams in the exploration and synthesis process, and how to set a cadence for your UX design work so that a comfortable buffer exists to allow for continual evolution of the product based on user feedback and changing understanding. Baked into the presentation will be case studies, challenges and lessons learned on recent lean/agile projects.
Attendees will learn about how user research and product validation fits into lean product delivery. Attendees will come to understand how to react to challenging situations in product development so that validation does not get left behind. Finally, attendees will understand how PMs and Designers have to work together with the delivery team to ensure that a shared understanding on the product exists so that the team can work as efficiently as possible.
design/UX teams customer research
Building Your Actionable Feedback Loop
Jevin Maltais
Lean practitioner & president of Quickjack Solutions
It's one thing to put a product or service out into the world and hope everyone loves it. It's another thing to learn from your users what you should do next to make it better. In this tactical session, Jevin will discuss multiple feedback channels, strategies, tools for you to get qualitative and quantitative data from your users. This data can then be directly translated into actionable decision to increase retention, user experience, and the likelihood to increase referrals.
MVP customer development
FastWorks: Lean Startup at GE
Ranjit Das
FastWorks Master Trainer & Lean Startup Coach
A recent Harvard Business School article highlighted GE's adoption of Lean Startup principles:
"GE has responded to this drive for speed and need to align more closely with customers' needs by using a new technique called "FastWorks." It's a framework for entrepreneurs, building on "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries."
As a Fastworks Mastertrainer and coach Ranjit Das - former CLO for GE Oil & Gas - has trained over 1000 GE managers on how the Lean Startup methodology can improve business outcomes. Ranjit's session will share his experience with Fastworks in GE.
Ranjit will describe specific approaches GE has taken to help embed the Lean Startup culture:
- Establishing cross-functional teams to work on New Product Introductions (NPI)
- Refocusing of the NPI budget to be more customer orientated
- Establishing an internal Venture Capital board to fund NPIs
- Merging of the traditional NPI tollgate approach with the Lean Startup approach
- Treating genuine new product development differently from 'product enhancements' or 'product extensions'
corporate innovation company culture
How to Ship Your Ideas
Poornima Vijayashanker
Founder of Femgineer
Are you busting at the seams with ideas for that next great software product, but feel overwhelmed trying to figure out how to bring those ideas to life? Perhaps you're feeling stuck and bombarded by the questions in your head asking things like, "Is this idea really any good?" or "Will it attract paying customers?", or "How in the world do I go about recruiting the right talent who can successfully help me ship a product?".
Entrepreneur, engineer, author, and speaker, Poornima Vijayashanker, will teach you how to tackle these questions and beyond. Channeling her experience as the founding engineer of mint.com, and launching BizeeBee and Femgineer, Poornima has developed a proven step-by-step process for successfully shipping the idea or ideas you’ve been dreaming about. She has shared her expertise and insights with entrepreneurs of various backgrounds around the world, lectured at her Alma Mater, Duke University, and served as the Engineer-in Residence for 500 Startups, a top accelerator in Silicon Valley.
From her book, How to Transform Your Ideas into Software Products, Poornima will teach you how to:
- Validate your idea before you spend time and money on it.
- Talk to prospective customers without feeling awkward or pushy.
- Hire talented people to build your product for you .
startup MVP lean product development
Lunch: 2-hour networking & street food market
We are partnering up with to give you something a bit different. Pick from a range of street food vendors and leisurely network with your fellow attendees.
Vendors being announced soon...
Discover Your Value Stream!
Brant Cooper
Author of The Lean Entrepreneur and The Lean Brand.
So, you get Lean Startup: MVPs, experiments, validation accounting, Leap of Faith Assumption. But how do you know what test? What to measure? Where to focus? Your value stream is comprised of all the activities your business must do succeed in the market. Each of your customer segments go through a set of states from first becoming Aware of you through (hopefully) becoming Passionate.
Value Stream Discovery helps you define your customer’s entire journey — from their perspective and yours! It helps you understand where to focus to have the biggest impact and establishes a dashboard to measure your progress.
corporate innovation startup
Growth Lessons from the 500 Startups Distro Dojo
Andy Young
Entrepreneur In Residence 500 startups
Distro Dojo is 500 Startups' growth marketing program for post-seed companies. In addition to providing growth-stage funding, Distro Dojos bring companies under the guidance of on-site mentors with world-class track records who train teams to operationalize and scale up their growth post product-market fit.
Dojos focus on “growth as a mindset”. Growth marketing isn’t a set of hacks (though those can be fun sometimes!) Scalable growth is a process of experimentation that builds growth into the structure of your organization itself.
Andy will share highlights from how 500 Startups teaches growth, focusing on actionable takeaways you'll be able to apply to your own businesses.
Corporate Startup Ecosystems & Innovation Obstacles
Tristan Kromer
Lean Startup Coach & Lean Startup Circle SF
Large companies aren't like startups, and copying their tactics can be frustrating and sometimes foolish. A big corporate is more like an ecosystem that has startups inside it, trying to survive. The CEO can't simply command innovation to occur and expect greatness. But we can change the ecosystem to support intrapreneurship.
So should we build a program like GE Fastworks? Or just copy Intuit's Innovation Catalyst? All ecosystems are different and blindly copying a model from Silicon Valley can lead to disaster. Every company must take it's strengths and weaknesses into account and design an innovation program to complement them.
This talk will focus on how to map out your corporate ecosystem and identify obstacles to innovation that are putting the brakes on innovation.
corporate innovation corporate startup ecosystems innovation obstacles
Using Data to Make Emotionally-driven Products
Graham Paterson
Product Manager, Deliveroo
Creating a delightful product in a data-driven environment can be challenging. I'll be talking about the framework I use to create great experiences, whilst still delivering real value, and moving metrics. I'll go through which metrics show value, and how to set up your data stack to properly measure and improve your product experience.
"Graham will take his experience from Intuit and Transferwise to help us use data to understand how we build happiness and trust within our startups.
Helping to decide what to build to delight your users, and learn quickly if you've got it wrong"
startup data product/market fit
Implementing a Culture of Experimentation
Colin McFarland
Head of CRO and Product Owner of Experimentation Services at Skyscanner
Experimentation seems straight forward, test different ideas and choose the best outcome. However, when we expose ideas to real users in A/B tests, the outcome is often surprising. From our intuition and biases, to common pitfalls we consider to run smarter experiments, Colin will talk openly about implementing a culture of experimentation within Skyscanner.
This talk will not be recorded. You can only see this talk by attending Leanconf!
company culture experiments experiments MVP
Decision Hacks
Salim Virani
Founder of Source Institute & Leancamp
Startups succeed at innovation because of their speed and agility, and this boils down to how startup founders make decisions.
This talk is a distilled version of the workshop...
Based on the book Decision Hacks, which comes from in-depth experience in 25+ startup accelerators and thousands of startup investments, this talk makes sure you're equipped to charge in and grow at startup speed:
- When being fast is better than being right
- Choosing your next experiments based on what information is worth collecting
- Managing unpredictable projects
- Interpreting (imperfect) data
- Time management in fast-changing environments
- Making decisions with a team, and helping your team shift to evidence-based decision making
- Mental hygiene
- Knowing when to focus and when to explore
Break
Closing Keynote: Why Customer Development Isn't Working
Cindy Alvarez
Director of UX at Yammer, Microsoft
There are teams right now who are forming hypotheses and seeking out relevant customers to invalidate them. They're uncovering great insights and identifying competitive product opportunities and bringing those back to their team. And then... the company ignores them in favor of what their 'gut' says to do. Why does this happen? How can we stop it?
It's not hopeless, but it's a lot harder than just chatting on the phone with your target customers. In this talk, I'll explain what we're up against and why we're so resistant to invalidated hypotheses and overturned assumptions. And better yet, how we can anticipate challenges and work against the cognitive biases and the dozens of tactical obstacles that work to keep the status quo in place.
keynote Customer Development MVP Corporate innovation
Closing
Dinner
Time to get a bite to eat before the evening networking event.
We will suggest places to go and help self-organising groups to go for dinner. So you won't be left without someone to talk to.
Evening Networking
In partnership with: 
We are hosting a networking event.
At the event there will be an oppotunity to play a game of Playing Lean with one of the founders.
Where:
Day 3 23rd April
Unconference
- Open, multi-track unconference shaped by you.
-
On day three we are bringing back (by popular demand) the Leancamp.
There are many reasons why people cite Leancamp as the best part of our event. The top one by far is that over 98% of participant leave with actionable insights that they can apply within a week or less.
Everyone has the power to drive the Leancamp agenda, to contribute their experience, and to bring their challenges to thought-leaders and experienced founders who are creating faster ways to get traction.
You can read more about Leancamp on their site
Confirmed Sessions
How to Ship Your Ideas Workshop
Poornima Vijayashanker
Founder of Femgineer
This workshop is an extension of the How to Ship Your Ideas Talk. It is recommended that participants attend that talk before attending this workshop.
In this workshop, Poornima will walk participants through a series of exercises, to help them:
- Hone their pitch to potential customers, teammates, and investors
- Design a landing page that conveys their idea to attract potential customers
- Identify their ideal early adopters
- Create a launch plan
Surprise Session with Brant
Brant Cooper
Author of The Lean Entrepreneur and The Lean Brand.
You help us decide what session to run with Brant
Decision Hacks
Salim Virani
Founder of Source Institute & Leancamp
Startups succeed at innovation because of their speed and agility, and this boils down to how startup founders make decisions.
Based on the book Decision Hacks, which comes from in-depth experience in 25+ startup accelerators and thousands of startup investments, this workshop throws you into a roller-coaster of situations so you're equipped to charge in and grow at startup speed:
A follow on from Salim's talk from the previous day.
Which Test Should I run?
Tristan Kromer
Lean Startup Coach & Lean Startup Circle SF
Should I run a Concierge or a Wizard of Oz test? Maybe a smoke test? And what exactly is "Picnic in the Graveyard"?
Lean Startup is full of buzzwords and jargon that is beyond confusing. Our reaction is to over simplify our advice to startups into Step 1, 2, 3 dogma that often results in bad advice. Does every startup need to create a early signup smoke test? Will a B2B product focused on the energy sector really have a CIO sign up based on a landing page?
Real Startups don't need dogma or a step by step process. They need a well organized toolbox that let's them choose the right tool at the right time.
This talk will focus on how to coach startups to identify their biggest risks and choose the right experiment or research method to find their business model.
Concierge MVP Challenge
Jevin Maltais
Lean practitioner & president of Quickjack Solutions
Take any product idea and work with others to create a product that you can launch in a week. The emphasis will be on raw hustle and using existing technologies that you can glue together.
Playing Lean @ Leanconf
Robbert van Geldrop
Partner at Firmhouse
Playing Lean is our "flight simulator" for innovation and Lean Startup. Examples of Dutch participants: "Game helps reflect on reality.", "It was a lot of fun and gave good insights in the lean startup method.", "Good to learn the basic principles of how to build a lean startup by doing a board game."
Analytics for Startups
Andy Young
Entrepreneur In Residence 500 startups
In recent years umpteen tools and platforms have arisen to assist with measuring and analysing your data, but it's all too easy to get stuck drowning under irrelevant information and fail to grasp the fundamentals of how your business is performing and can scale.
Based on his own startup experience and working with many tens of companies, Andy will share his top practical tips on how to measure your way to success.
Surprise Session with Cindy
Cindy Alvarez
Director of UX at Yammer, Microsoft
Help us decide what session to run with Cindy
Unconference Schedule
Registration
Session Planning
Sessions
Lunch
2nd Session Planning
Sessions
Break
Sessions
Closing
Evening Day 3 • 23rd April
For anyone that wants to come. We will head out to get some food and then go to a bar. Sample some of Manchester's night life.
Informal Evening Networking
More details close to the time.
Sponsors & Partners
We couldn't put Leanconf on without help from our wonderful partners.
Gold
Evening sponsor
Silver
Media Partners
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