It’s one thing to read about Lean Startup. It’s another to make it work with the nuances of your own startup. And so, just like in understanding our customers, sometimes you’ve just got to get out of the building and see how others are doing it.

Lean Startup Circle Meetups are awesome because they bring in startups to share their own experiences. The one shared by Buz at last night’s Lean Startup Circle Boston was so cool I wanted to share it here.

Caomhan Connolly is a 21 year old entrepreneur from Dublin ("I’m from Ireland, like everyone else in Boston" :) ).

Caomhan is the co-founder of Buz, a startup in ChinAccelerator (like a TechStars for China) that’s creating a hardware + software solution to help brick & mortar businesses get more customers through social media.

Read More…..

Calling all developers who want to change the world…

My Lean Startup 101 for Developers presentation that I delivered at the Entrepreneurial Track for New England CodeCamp:

If you like this – check out The Hacker Chick Labs & join in the conversation on how you are changing the world.

“How many of you have been on a team in a state of shared vision?” This is the question Jim McCarthy used to kick off last night’s Agile Boston presentation. “Now, stay standing if you thought that team was at least 2x as effective as a team without one… 5x more effective… 10x more effective.”  The majority of us stayed standing throughout.

Yes, that’s just what it is. So how do we create teams with this shared vision – those unstoppable, awe-inspiring teams that are so wonderful to be part of?

Jim and his wife Michelle have spent the last 15 years studying teams in their teamwork laboratory in search of an answer to this question. From this has evolved a set of commitments and protocols they call the Core Protocols.

Read More…..

The Agile Manifesto, which we created to uncover better ways of developing software, says,

We value Working Software over Documentation

And we do. We’d much rather have actual, real live, working software then reams of documentation proclaiming all the great stuff this as-of-yet-nonexistent software is going to do at some point in the future.

However, agile is also about learning and adapting. And 10 years after it’s creation, one of the manifesto’s creators — Kent Beck — is looking at what agile means for startups. In a startup, he says, there’s actually something we value more than working software.

We value Learning over Working Software

Agile helps us develop software as efficiently as possible – we can bang out quality code really fast with it. But what good does fast or quality do if you’re building a product that nobody wants?

Startups aren’t just small versions of large organizations. They’re about learning and discovery, not execution. All we’ve got are ideas (Kent calls these “almost impossibles”). And so we take these ideas and we think about how we might measure (or validate) whether people would be willing to pay for them. We might build software in order to validate our ideas, but working software is not our goal here. Our goal is learning.

Read More…..