Agile2013

There is a trap hidden inside Lean Startup's CustDev cycle. If entrepreneurs want to be successful, they have to be passionate about their ideas. They need to understand more about their customers than anyone else. I’ve spent the last year lecturing to and teaching entrepreneurs and I've observed that their passion for their idea and their belief that they already DO know everything about their customers can prevent them from actually LEARNING what they need to know in order to create as successful business. The same passion and positive psychology required to succeed in the face of uncertainty is hindering them from learning fast enough to survive.

How can we take our passion, our vision, a couple “wild ass guesses”, and produce meaningful, validated learning?

# Stand back... we are going to try science.

The question of how to learn as an organization and how to DEMONSTRATE learning has been explored by philosophers of science and by business theorists for years. What can the Lean Startup Community learn about creating scientifically valid experiments that create actionable knowledge?

This session will explore the theoretical relationships between scientific hypotheses and scientific experiments. We will explore the theory behind using effective questions to invalidate assumptions and following through with the learning process after an error in the hypothesis is detected. We’ll learn how to detect hypothesis and questions that can’t be falsified and therefore only lead to vanity validation not learning.

We’ll learn how to fail well and fail faster by keeping our passion focused on the vision and our dispassionate logic focused on the assumptions.