Lean Startup applied

The Lean Startup movement isn't just for small companies. No company can afford to continue to undertake large software projects that don't end up providing a meaningful ROI. In this track we look at how your organization can become more efficient at delivering business value by better adopting the processes and practices that successful lean startups apply.

Day of week:

Thursday

Location:

Grand Ballroom - Salon C

Host:

Peter Bell

Presentations

Building with Lean: A Cross-Functional Pairing Approach

2:50pm - 3:40pm

By: Ben Burton , Jono Mallanyk

Part of the inspiration for lean is to eliminate as much unnecessary work as possible to arrive at a valuable end-product. Methodologies such as Lean UX aim to design the best customer experience in the shortest cycle possible, but how do these approaches apply when it comes to executing and shipping a functional Minimum Viable Product? In this talk, designer Jono Mallanyk and software engineer Ben Burton delve into the hands-on approach they've taken to cross-functional pairing to design and build products quickly and effectively. In this talk, they'll detail how and when to involve execution in the lean process, tools and techniques they've found useful for developers and designers working together, and do some live cross-functional pairing to demonstrate their process. At Neo Innovation Labs, Jono and Ben have spent the past 6 months pairing as designer and developer, learning from each other, and honing their cross-functional process to arrive at a truly lean approach to software creation.
Lean Engineering: Applying lean startup principles at Paypal

5:10pm - 6:00pm

By: Bill Scott

How do you take a gigantic organization like PayPal and begin to transform the engineering organization to act like a startup? How does engineering become a first class partner to bringing great experiences to life?
Engineering is often the key blocker in being able to achieve a high rate of innovation and often not at the table helping to craft experiences up front. In this talk, Bill Scott will give specific principles on how to think & build your engineering stack in a startup manner no matter the size of your company.
He will take you through specifically how his team has re-factored a large enterprise technology stack into a lean engineering stack and also changed the way engineers work with design & product partners. In addition, Bill will provide additional examples that go back to his early days writing one of the first Macintosh games to his more recent work at Netflix on the power of enabling a build/measure/learn oriented engineering organization.
Lean'ing at Crowdtap

4:00pm - 4:50pm

By: Kareem Kouddous

We'll walk through how Crowdtap scaled from 2 developers, one product manager and one Rails app to 12 engineers a four person product team and 12 apps. We'll cover how we migrated to a service oriented architecture and Javascript MVC, how we practice continuos deployment and how we use Kanban to organize around autonomous cross-functional teams
Screwing Up For Less

10:20pm - 11:10pm

By: Stephen Hardisty

At Etsy, we have no project managers to make sure things are released on time. We have no testers confirming things work before we release. We have no business analysts producing specifications for engineers. We have people who analyze user behavior, manage the product experience, look after our hardware and write code. In this talk I will discuss how we are able to deliver products that our customers enjoy and why we break surprisingly few things along the way.
The Assassin's Mindset: Identifying Assumptions to De-Risk Your Idea

1:40pm - 2:30pm

By: Giff Constable

Every product is built upon a belief system. We make assumptions about the customer, their need, the best solution, the business model, etc. We like to believe that our opinions are facts, but in truth they are mere hypotheses abou the world. If we are truly "lean", our mission is to identify our beliefs, separate out the riskiests assumptions, and invalidate the vulnerable ones as quickly as possible. In this talk, Giff Constable, a repeat entrepreneur and current Managing Director at Neo, will share 4 tactics for thinking holistically about your idea and clearly identifying, prioritizing and tackling your assumptions.
Lean Unconference

11:30pm - 12:40pm

By: Amr Elssamadisy

Meeting each other in the context of conversations we care about is why at QCon we are giving prime time to the unconference format; it creates a space for peer-to-peer learning, collaboration and creativity.

First we’ll father in a circle to be guided through creating an agenda using open space technology. Then there will be three three 20 minute time slots, each with 5 concurrent break out discussions that were designed by you.

Attendees often know more than the speakers! Bring your questions, ideas - be prepared to be surprised.