MIT’s Entrepreneurship Center asked me to give an Agile Product Management workshop for their Hacking IAP course. The course is a special seminar in management they’re doing for MIT student entrepreneurs. It takes place over the IAP (January) term and is open to all MIT students that have startups already underway.

The first week of the course is a series of guest lectures from industry experts on how to get shit done (that’s where I come in). After that, the course serves as a mini-accelerator with students applying what they’ve learned to their startups and receiving mentoring from myself and the other lecturers. The course concludes with a demo day at the end of the term – which I can’t wait to see!

Here are my slides – I actually beefed this up a little for SlideShare, adding some bullet points for the key talking points (I know, bullet points suck – but otherwise all you have are pictures). Hope you enjoy!

Joshua Kerievsky posted this most excellent table illustrating some of the differences between Agile and Lean Startup.

I think this is so awesome because it shows how much more real everything is in Lean Startup.

Take Velocity vs. AARRR (AARRR are Dave McClure’s startup metrics that measure things like how many people are visiting your site, buying your product, etc.). In Agile, we measure progress with Velocity, we say “how much software did we develop this week?” Lean Startup says “Who the hell cares how much software we developed this week – how many people bought our product or used our software” – you know, the things we actually care about.

Source: Industrial Logic’s BLogic

I just got back from Agile 2011 and I have to admit, I was skeptical. It’s been 10 years since we signed the Agile Manifesto and I just had to wonder, “it’s been 10 years – why do we still need a conference on this? We get it already!”

But I was also excited because they had a new stage called New Horizons about What’s Next for Agile? And I had the extreme honor of getting to present on this stage to share what’s been happening in the Startup community with the Agile community. To talk about how I believe Lean Startup is what’s next for agile. Not just startup projects, but all development.

And in the end – as it always seems to be – meeting all of the awesome people, having all of the enlightening (and sometimes slightly drunken) discussions, and remembering just how freakin’ amazing the Agile community truly is – I left feeling incredibly inspired, energized, and with this unshakeable feeling that there is just so much potential – so much more we can all be doing. So, even if 10 years has gone by, that doesn’t take away from how much more we can accomplish.

And with that in mind, here’s a quick screencast on how I believe Lean Startup pushes agile development to the next level…

You can find my complete slide deck on slideshare and I’d love to hear your thoughts on what’s next for agile.

What do YOU think is next for agile? Or do you think all this agile stuff is just crazy talk?

Awesome time presenting to the Beantown .NET Developers last night (thanks, Ben Day!).

My secret plan is to travel far and wide, getting developers excited about working for startups.You know, like an evangelist or something…

You can also find a short (~10 minute) version of this with the voice over here: Lean Startup 101 for Developers.
And you might also check out Is Deploying to Production 50x/Day a GOOD Idea? for some additional thoughts on Continuous Deployment.

What Lean Startup topics would YOU like to learn more about?