It started with a tweet wondering how people in Detroit were coping with water shut-offs. Two months later, Detroit Water Project co-founders Tiffani Bell and Kristy Tillman have matched Detroit residents with $150K in donations. Bell explains how they moved so quickly.
Photography as a Research Tool
When you’re doing customer research, written notes are valuable, but they present only one perspective about the people you’re trying learn about. Megan Kierstead, Principal at Social Ergonomics, shares techniques for using photography as a user research tool.
Lean Brand Building
Defining a brand can be risky, especially in the early days of startup, when your market and product are still geling. In this talk, Laura Busche, author of Lean Branding, will share practical tips for useful, early-stage brand-building.
Tactics for Truly Effective Experiment Design
It’s deceptively easy to test the wrong aspect of your business, wasting time and money while you head down the wrong path. Rather than test the wrong hypotheses or an inappropriate risk for your stage of product development, learn from Grace Ng, co-founder at QuickMVP, as she lays out road-tested tactics for truly effective experiment design.
Boost Collaboration, Improve Experimentation
To succeed, experimentation requires more collaboration and communication across roles than most of us are used to. How can organizations make sure that teams share information in meaningful and action-oriented ways? Julie Lorch, head of user experience at DoSomething.org, gives us advice.
Minimum Viable Belief: Experimentation in a Faith-Based Organization
Startups and churches share more in common than you might realize–not least of which is a high failure rate. Ken Howard, founding pastor at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church in Germantown, Maryland, talks about experiments he’s made with his congregation to help it thrive during times of uncertainty.
When the Scope Is Huge, One Way to Tell You’re Making Progress
As the team saving the Healthcare.gov site grew, they used an unusual metric to gauge success. Mark Ferlatte, co-founder at Tetherpad and member of the Healthcare.gov rescue team, tells the story.
The Questions You Should Be Asking Customers but Aren’t
When you interview customers, you don’t know what you don’t know–and you don’t know what questions you should be asking but aren’t. Zac Cohn, founder at Wonful, runs an exercise to teach you how to ask the right questions and uncover exactly what you need.
Build a Culture that Outsmarts Perfectionism
The build-measure-learn loop is often accompanied by the frustration-confusion-failure cycle. In other words, implementing Lean Startup methods is hard–particularly when your experiments invalidate a lot of your ideas. In this talk, Seppo Helava, founder at Nonsense Industry, teaches us how he’s led his team to overcome perfectionism and become more comfortable with grey areas and failure.
Live, No-excuses Customer Development
When you have an untested concept, it’s easy to come up with reasons to avoid customer development or ignore the qualitative feedback you’re getting. Cindy Alvarez, author of Lean Customer Development and head of product design and user research for Yammer (a Microsoft company), leads several entrepreneurs through a live problem-solving session, highlighting actionable approaches to customer development challenges.
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