How to apply the 'lean startup' methodology to your work

Atma Connect, a California-based nonprofit that connects users in Indonesia with the goal of “warga bantu warga,” or neighbors helping neighbors, considers itself a lean startup. “We were constantly asking our users what their daily challenges were and how we could build a product that could help them,” said the CEO, Meena Palaniappan, at the Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco last week. The “lean startup” methodology shortens feedback loops by drawing on customer insights to iteratively build products or services to meet their needs. In the case of Atma Connect, the “minimum viable product,” or MVP, was an app to share water price information, but when users said they wanted to share information on other topics, from education to garbage to floods, the team pivoted and launched a hyperlocal social network. As these tools make their way from product development into global development, here are some ways you can apply lean startup principles such as working smarter not harder into your work. Put simply, the lean startup methodology helps organizations become more efficient in the ways they spend their money and develop their products and services to meet the needs of customers or beneficiaries, said Steve Blank, an entrepreneur-turned-educator who launched the lean startup movement with his customer development methodology. The methodology consists of three parts: framing the hypothesis with the business model canvas, testing the hypothesis in front of customers with the customer development methodology, and building minimum viable products in an iterative and incremental process of building, measuring, learning. “There are no facts inside the building so get the hell outside,” Blank said as a way to summarize the way to do customer development. “Know the pains and gains of your customers so you can achieve your mission objective.” By taking the lean startup approach, organizations can treat each step as a search for the truth before they scale, acknowledging that their initial assumptions were just guesses and their guesses might be wrong, Blank said. More than a decade ago, Blank would only agree to investing in a social media company provided the co founders would audit his class on entrepreneurship at the University of California, Berkeley. When Eric Ries learned about the customer development methodology, he immediately saw the need to combine it with agile engineering, which is all about building not sequentially but iteratively. Ries, whom Blank calls the best student he ever had, went on to popularize the method when he wrote “The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.” “Really the essence of lean startup is to figure out which aspects of the plan are wrong sooner,” Ries told Devex of the need for the approach in efforts to pursue goals as ambitious and important as ending poverty by 2030. “We owe it to this mission to make sure that the things that we’re pursuing actually work so that we don’t find ourselves waking up in 2029 realizing oops we’re going to miss this massive goal.” Ries spoke with Devex during Lean Startup Week, which gathered thousands of entrepreneurs, investors, and thought leaders in San Francisco for keynote talks, interactive workshops, startup tours, and more. The crowds at Pier 27 were a visual representation of how lean startup has expanded from a methodology into a movement. And the lineup of speakers revealed the many ways lean startup has been applied across industries, from a talk on running a lean startup for social good by Michael Gelobter, the author of “Lean Startups for Social Change,” to a talk on design prints by Jake Knapp, a design partner at Google Ventures and author of “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days.” “We’re trying to solve poverty,” said Wendy Gonzalez, managing director at Samasource, in a presentation at the Lean Startup Conference on how the organization is using lean startup. “You can't help people if your business doesn't exist.” One of the most oversubscribed sessions at the conference was a presentation on how to apply lean startup within a large organization. Participants learned about a report by Telefonica, the broadband and telecommunications provider, on the innovation challenge in big companies. Recommendations included helping leaders understand what customer development and market validation means, partnering with technology developers and market leaders, and reviewing innovation frameworks periodically. On Thursday, Devex sat in on “Hacking for Diplomacy,” a course where students apply lean startup principles to their real world challenges faced by the U.S. Department of State and other civilian agencies. Students presented updates on their projects, which ranged from improving data on refugees to reducing forced labor in apparel supply chains to assessing the effectiveness of peacekeeping units. Then Zvika Krieger, who is the State Department representative to Silicon Valley, stood before an org chart as he spoke about some of the challenges to consider when making plans to deploy these minimum viable products. The course grew out of “Hacking for Defense,” which paired students with the Department of Defense, and half of those groups continue to work on their projects from the spring semester with funding from the DOD. When he designed the course, Blank adapted the business model canvas, developed by Alexander Osterwalder, into a mission model canvas for organizations whose primary goal is not to earn revenue. He changed revenue streams to mission achievement, customer segments to beneficiaries, and customer acquisition to customer buy in, and told Devex that the global development community might also consider using this framework. Still, while the stakes are high, the challenges are many when it comes to incorporating the lean startup approach into areas such as international development, global health and humanitarian response. Before Atma Connect, Palaniappan launched WATER SMS, a project to provide better water services for the urban poor in Indonesia. In exchange for $1 million from an international donor to fund the project, she had to lay out her month by month plan for the next three years. That prevented her from being responsive to users on the ground, she said. “It was this kind of product and this kind of funding that was making me so frustrated by the pace of international development,” she said. Too many projects tell poor people what to do or collect information from poor people, versus looking at poor people as users, she said. But while the lean startup methodology has made its way from product development to global development, the funding models have yet to reflect the growing number of programs involving users in the design from iteration to implementation. Lean startups in the social sector need sustained and flexible funding so they can keep responding to user needs, Palaniappan said. Our mission is to do more good for more people. 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