Innovation Resources

Kromatic offers more than 300 innovation resources including frameworks, templates, articles, videos, and workshops to accelerate your project. You can find the most relevant resources by filtering for innovation stage or type.

Innovation Stage

Ideation (55)

Validation (106)

Growth (64)

Contact us to locate the right framework for you.

Engines of Growth: What Is a Retention Rate?

Those are the three “engines of growth” suggested by Eric Ries in The Startup Way. Companies can pick one of the three to be great at, but they generally can...

Strategy Is a Verb

Why is strategy always used as a noun? Why do we talk more about strategy than we do about strategizing? Why do we think of strategy as something static? Goo...

Advice to Innovation Boards: Agree to Disagree

Innovation board members should not be driven by consensus — at least not when it comes to truly disruptive innovation. If everyone agrees and the decision i...

Early Decisions Are Better Than Later

It seems natural to defer a decision until you have the maximum amount of information possible, but that’s rarely the optimal path.

Hacking Procrastination

I hate starting from a blank page on a new project. Some people find it liberating, but I find it tedious. I’m prone to delaying a new start until the last p...

Calculating the Value of Your Innovation Team

She pitches it to her boss. Everyone thinks it’s great. They both want you in front of the innovation board with the CEO, COO, and CFO to get funding for it.

Lean Startup Certification

Any playbook on innovation methodologies is bound to be obsolete by the time it is published. I worked with a team of entrepreneurs to write The Real Startup...

What Is Innovation Accounting?

Innovation Accounting sounds like one of those semi-humorous oxymorons like “accurate rumors,” “the rules of anarchy,” or “airline schedules.”

Facilitation Guides - Stakeholder Management

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through identifying stakeholders who can influ...

Where Corporate Strategy Meets Innovation Strategy

Every once in a while, there’s a question on a forum or in a breakout room that really starts a wild discussion. My favorite example from the Innov8rs forum ...

Innovation Strategy: Where to Explore, When to Launch, and How to Hack

Innovation strategy isn’t like playing chess, where you can see the entire board laid out before you. With innovation strategy, you lack the information need...

The Trials and Unexpected Benefits of Screwing Up

Our profound and unreserved apologies. Last Wednesday, we screwed up and accidentally spammed a large number of our subscribers.

Facilitation Guides - Customer Relationships

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through the process of building a base of enga...

How to Win at Startup Poker

Poker can be a lot of fun if you have a witty enough group of friends and a generous snack budget. There’s nothing worse than playing poker with a bunch of s...

Facilitation Guides - Marketing Channel Development

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through the identification of mediums to reach...

Startup Poker Rules

Try our game of Startup Poker, where you can practice matching your business model to your market.

S.I.M.P.L.E. Experiment Design

Getting started with rapid experimentation can be daunting, but a few simple tricks will help even advanced practitioners focus on their critical risks. The ...

Measuring Innovation Boards

When large organizations develop innovation programs, they typically adopt metered funding as a way to resource these new innovation projects. This metered f...

Facilitation Guides - Building Teams

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through a human resource acquisition strategy ...

Facilitation Guides - Complex Sales Calls

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through the preparation, execution, and follow...

Mindset Map Template

This template provides the space and structure to outline the mindset your team currently possesses so that you can identify what is desirable in your next n...

Facilitation Guides - Leadership Habits

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through the process of adding productive leade...

Facilitation Guides - Complex Sales Mapping

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through creating a scalable sales process to m...

Facilitation Guides - Team Accountability

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through rituals and practices that will establ...

Kromatic Client Case Study – CBUSA

After our coaching program, the CBUSA team grew from ad hoc membership to a fully cross-functional team of 7, and their innovation planning went from 2-3 tim...

Sales Call Note Taking Template

A detailed note taking template best used for video or voice sales calls.

The Hidden Investor in Corporate Growth Boards

Growth boards — also known as corporate innovation boards, investor boards, or innovation steering committees — are all the rage these days. Corporations are...

Reverse Press Release Template

Use this template to describe a north star for the team so they’ll always know which direction to go. Write a press release that you want to be written about...

How to Calculate Opportunity Cost of Innovation

When corporations start investing in innovation, they try to base decisions on evidence, and only give away enough resources when the evidence justifies the ...

Levels of Innovation Metrics

When people say they want to measure innovation or implement innovation accounting, they are often talking about a number of different things, and trying to ...

Sprint Retrospective Template

Here’s a simple template that you can use to run sprint retrospectives. This template asks an individual or a team to reflect on three things: What went well...

Sprint Review Template

Sprint reviews take place at the end of the sprint. Between a sprint planning meeting and daily standups, you should be able to get through most of the week ...

Daily Standup Template

Daily standups are short meetings that offer team members a chance to give updates on their sprint goals. They serve as a valuable tool for keeping the team ...

Facilitation Guides - Coaching Mindset & Facilitation Techniques

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare themselves for coaching sessions with teams, both from a mental and logistica...

Backlog Grooming Template

The Backlog Grooming Template is all about making sure we have a healthy “bucket” of work to pull from when we are planning our sprints. The backlog should c...

Sprint Planning Template

A sprint is a time-boxed iteration within which a team does its work. A sprint can last one week, two weeks, or even just a few days. This template helps tea...

Levels of Innovation Metrics (poster)

When starting an innovation program, be clear about what you’re trying to measure. If you measure the wrong thing, it will only obscure the truth of whether ...

Innovators Handbook 2021

We’ve always been big fans of the Innov8rs conference, and giant fans of unconferences. It’s the best way to get past the buzzwords and have real discussions...

Facilitation Guides - Creating Effective Exercises

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons, including generating exercises to effectively teach new practi...

Innovation, Climate Change, and the Economy

Like many Americans stuck in the turmoil of our political season, a global pandemic, and murder hornets (still a thing), I’ve got a lot on my mind. But burie...

Facilitation Guides - Innovation and Portfolio Management

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through allocating resources to innovation pro...

Learning Journey Mad Lib Template

Coaches use this template when helping someone unlearn something, which is often the first step to teaching them something.

Exercise Facilitator Guide

Use this template to plan and execute an effective learning exercise.

Completing a 2×2 Risk Prioritization Matrix

Risk mapping is one of the most important activities an entrepreneur should conduct when laying out a potential business model. A 2×2 matrix is a common tech...

Facilitation Guides - Project Management & Roadmapping

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons so they can guide others in designing a project roadmap for pro...

Facilitation Guides - Innovation Ecosystem Design & Metrics

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through measuring and repairing their innovati...

Customer Validation under Lockdown

The COVID-19 crisis has been a bust for customer discovery. Gone are the days of visiting crowded cafés, bars, and co-working spaces to conduct interviews wi...

2x2 Risk Mapping Template

This is a simple template that will help your team notestorm questions and prioritize which of those questions to experiment on first.

Innovation Project Evaluation Worksheet

Use this template to consistently apply decision criteria when allocating budget to an innovation project.

Innovation Process Checklist

Use and modify this checklist as a benchmark against which to measure innovation investment and management decisions.

Stage Gate Process Criteria Template

This is a basic innovation funnel template for designing your stage gates process based on objective, resources and unknowns.

Basic Portfolio Allocation Template - Google Sheets

A basic template to help you plan and allocate budget for your innovation portfolio.

Basic Innovation Funnel Template - Google Sheets

A simple template that you can use to design and model innovation funnels.

Value Proposition Statement Mad Lib Template - Google Slides

A simple template that you can use to explain your value proposition.

Facilitation Guides - Innovation Ecosystem Triage

This slide deck contains instructions and notes for teaching the definition of an innovation ecosystem as well as symptoms that indicate where to improve the...

Innovation Tactics & Events

This is a short list of innovation enabling methods designed to counteract innovation blockers in your ecosystem.

Innovation Obstacle Map

A template on how to identify and map out obstacles to innovation that are holding your ecosystem back.

Facilitation Guides - Financial (and Mission Impact) Modeling

This slide deck contains instructions and notes to prepare first a visual and then a quantified financial model for an early stage idea.

Skill-Mapping Guide

This guide instructs you how to identify and map your and your team's existing skills to better understand the resources (and skill gaps) at hand.

Financial Modeling Monte Carlo Analysis Example (xlsx)

This template is an extension of the basic financial modeling template which incorporates a Monte Carlo analysis to improve predictions. This analysis uses b...

Financial Modeling Monte Carlo Analysis Example (Google Sheet)

This template is an extension of the basic financial modeling template which incorporates a Monte Carlo analysis to improve predictions. This analysis uses b...

Facilitation Guides - Value Proposition Tests

This slide deck contains instructions and notes for coaches to prepare for and guide others through testing value propositions.

Why Are You Starting Your Innovation Program from Scratch?

More and more companies are jumping on the innovation bandwagon and starting their own innovation program. It could be in the form of an accelerator, an inno...

Facilitation Guides - Survey Design

This slide deck contains instructions and notes for effective survey design in an innovative environment. It covers the dos and don'ts of running surveys to ...

Fear the Zebra

This is where we coined the term Z.E.B.R.A., which stands for Zero Evidence But Really Arrogant. The Zebra is a far more disreputable animal than the hippo.

Version History

Contributors

How to Use This Book

Who Is This Book For?

Experiment Calculator

Get clear results from quantitative experiments using this Sample size and Margin of Error Calculator. Compare results vs. a benchmark or compare a number o...

Applying Innovation Metrics and Objectives by Department

Innovation Management isn’t just the fun stuff like coaching teams and setting up investor boards. It requires developing an entire innovation ecosystem, and...

Rules of Thumb for Quantitative Experiments

A lot of innovation work involves small sample sizes and relies on qualitative data. Design thinking, agile, customer discovery, and lean startup all emphasi...

Basic Financial Modeling Template (Google Sheet)

This spreadsheet template helps you create a practical financial model with a small number of key hypotheses. This template represents your business model as...

Index of Methods

Index of Questions

Scorecards

A scorecard is an evaluative decision-making or prioritizing shortcut, often done in a spreadsheet.

Off-Brand Testing

Off-brand testing is a technique that helps established companies run experiments while minimizing risk to their brand equity.

A/B Testing

A/B testing (also known as split testing and bucket testing) is a randomized method of comparing two versions of an element (A and B) against each other to d...

Wizard of Oz

The Wizard of Oz (WOZ) test involves one or more individuals simulating fully functioning product features without the use of technology.

Usability Testing

Usability testing involves observing people trying to complete a series of tasks while using an interactive product.

Product/Market Fit Survey

The Product/Market Fit Survey (PMF) specifically asks the customer, “How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?” with a multiple choice resp...

Paper Prototyping

Quickly test a solution idea by simulating user-product interactions using paper drawings and cutouts.

Net Promoter Score Survey

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) identifies customer loyalty to the brand or product.

Dashboards

A dashboard is a simple view of product metrics that displays information about the general health and viability of the product.

Solution Interview

The solution interview builds on our research around the problem and proposes a solution to see how potential customers react.

Picnic in the Graveyard

This technique involves exploring "near miss" failures similar to our product idea to generate ideas about what to test and how to build a business model tha...

Dogfooding

Dogfooding is simply using the product as if we were the customer and experiencing it firsthand.

Demo Pitch

A demo pitch is when we present or pitch our solution using some kind of product or service demonstration in the hope of convincing a potential customer to buy.

Concierge Test

Concierge is a technique to test the solution of a customer problem by manually performing tasks as a service.

Competitor Usability Testing

Competitor usability testing is observing our target market using a competitor’s products or services to gain insights on the mindset of the user, common iss...

Competitor Analysis

Competitive analysis is very much a secondary research method that we can perform online relatively quickly and comprehensively.

Ask an Expert

Founders ask experts for opinions, then choose whether or not to act on those opinions.

Analog/Digital

This technique helps decouple the risks around physical delivery of a product from a digital component of the product.

Value Proposition Test - Video

The video smoke test consists of using a trailer video to test excitement and virality/buzz when describing the product to an early-adopter audience.

Value Proposition Test - Sales Pitch

Conducting a sales pitch as a smoke test is when an entrepreneur pitches a value proposition to a potential user or customer for the purpose of gathering fee...

Value Proposition Test - Pre-Sales

Pre-sales involves accepting payment in exchange for a promise to deliver the value proposition at a later date.

Value Proposition Test - Pocket

This smoke test applies to physical goods or products with hardware components — at minimum a mobile phone.

Value Proposition Test - Landing Page

A landing page used as a minimum viable product evaluates whether a particular type of customer wants a proposed product based on actual behavior (as opposed...

Value Proposition Test - High Bar

A high bar test helps to gauge the customer’s willingness to pay without using any form of monetary payment.

Value Proposition Test - Flyer

Flyers serve as placeholders for conversations that need to happen.

Value Proposition Test - Fake Door

People are bad at predicting what they want, but they are great at reacting to new offers. Building just the entry to an offer makes it possible to predict f...

Value Proposition Test - Event

We can use an event to smoke test a problem, and to some extent, content that is attractive for our target audience.

Value Proposition Test - Broken Promise

This smoke test helps test how much of a natural/inherent virality lies in the idea itself. It helps identify high-potential ideas before we've built a product.

Secondary Market Research

Secondary market research gathers and interprets available information about the target market, and includes published reports, newspaper articles, or academ...

Comprehension Test

A comprehension test will evaluate whether or not the customer understands the marketing message explaining the value proposition.

Closed-Ended Survey

Converge on what's relevant in great detail, particularly to customers or prospects.

Open-Ended Survey

Fixed set of questions, usually via a mass-communication channel such as an email or website pop-up.

Focus Groups

A small group discussion designed to rapidly gain customer feedback on a given topic.

Experience Sampling

Get information about a participant's daily behaviors, thoughts, and feelings in real-time, or as close to it as possible.

Data Mining

Data mining uses statistics from large amounts of data to learn about target markets and customer behaviors.

Customer Discovery Interviews

Gain insight into customers' perspective, pain points, purchasing habits, and so forth.

Contextual Inquiry

Combination of semi-structured interviews and observations done in the actual location where the problem occurs or the solution will be used.

Tags and Other Frameworks

Hypothesis Checklist

A sure way to keep our sanity is to start with a strong hypothesis to give the experiment structure.

Generative vs. Evaluative

Do we have a clear hypothesis to evaluate or do we need to generate a clear idea?

Problem vs. Solution

Do we need to learn about the problem (ie, market) or the solution (ie, product)?

What Are You Trying to Learn?

“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” — Albert Einstein

Value Proposition Statement Mad Lib Template

A simple template that you can use to explain your value proposition.

Facilitation Guides - Practical Statistics

This slide deck contains instructions and notes for coaches to prepare for and guide others through statistical principles commonly applicable to running exp...

Innovation Ecosystem Design Using Liebig’s Law of the Minimum

When governments, corporations, and entrepreneurs start building innovation ecosystems, there’s a flurry of predictable activity.

Practical Statistics - Rules of Thumb

Apply these practical rules of thumb when running experiments to avoid common biases in the data you use to make business decisions.

Facilitation Guides - Innovation Culture & Group Behavior

This facilitation guide will help you coach someone to systematically create a culture of innovation that can scale to an entire organization.

Facilitation Guides - Experiment Types: The Real Startup Book

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches foster an understanding of the many common types of lean experiments and research met...

Facilitation Guides - Storyboarding & Metrics

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through the process of integrating quantitativ...

Facilitation Guides - Advanced Experiment & Research Design

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through experiment design to prevent common bi...

Complex Sales Calls

The customer discovery skills you’ve learned so far won’t close a sale. At some point, active listening and discovery of a customer’s problems must result in...

Customer Relationships

Early adopter customers are hard to find, but crucial to the success of an entrepreneur's product. A simple follow-up can build relationships and community a...

Marketing Channel Development

How does a company acquire effective sales channels and use them to scale sales & marketing? In this module we will discuss the different ways of scaling ...

Stakeholder Management

How can an innovation project avoid typical political hurdles of large companies? ifferent cultures, industry domains, and companies contain groups and i...

Team Accountability

Knowing the work that needs to be done on an innovation project is one thing. Knowing how to actually get it done is another. This module walks you through h...

Creating Effective Exercises

Using a topic of your choosing, you will construct exercises to demonstrate effective teaching towards an objective and key result. Participants will learn t...

Building Teams

How can an innovation project succeed when teams are working half time on the project? In short, they can’t (or it’s at least very very difficult!). Parti...

Effective Survey Design

Surveys are some of the best and worst tools for an innovator. They are great when you can collect valuable quantitative data (such as market size) very quic...

Innovation Ecosystem Design & Metrics

All ecosystems are different, and blindly copying another company’s model can lead to disaster. Each company must take its strengths and weaknesses into acco...

Leadership Habits

Become a better leader by identifying habits that work and don’t work in startup environments. This module helps you identify your own bad leadership habits ...

Innovation Strategy

Define a vision for the future, a path to get there, and effective watchtowers to see when disruption is coming. This module puts your company on the path to...

Business Model Design

This module shows you how startups use business models to drive innovation, including how uses of a business model differ between startups seeking product/ma...

Coaching Mindset & Facilitation Techniques

This module goes into the softer side of coaching, with a focus on familiarizing you with facilitation techniques, understanding different team makeups, and ...

Practical Statistics for Quantitative Experiments

Support your customer discovery, landing page, and comprehension test processes with a basic grasp of applicable statistics. You will learn how to recognize ...

Facilitation Guides - Customer Discovery and Debriefing

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through the end-to-end process of customer dis...

Pitching Innovation Projects

At some point, you're going to need resources and you're going to need to pitch to investors. Whether you're pitching a VC or an internal investment board at...

Usability Testing

Even if your product has all the right features, customers can't love what they can't use. You may have the curse of knowledge. What is obvious to you isn't ...

What Is an Innovation Ecosystem?

I don’t remember when I first heard the term innovation ecosystem, but I do remember how it had an immediate appeal. It sounded important. Something everyon...

Facilitation Guides - Customer Segmentation for Complex Sales (B2B)

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through the process of identifying the various...

Facilitation Guides - Business Model Risk Prioritization

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through the process of identifying the biggest...

Sales CRM Template (Google Sheet)

This is a simple, generic spreadsheet CRM that can (and should) be customized by early stage startups who are just establishing a sales process and beginning...

Complex Sales Buyer Type Matrix Template (Google Sheets)

Use the Complex Sales Buyer Type Matrix to deconstruct the roles and needs of each player in a complex sales process with your target customer. This is a sim...

S.M.A.R.T. Experiment Design

Entrepreneurs are strongly biased towards action to overcome analysis paralysis. But such haste often leads to poorly designed experiments and poorly conduct...

Complex (B2B) Sales Mapping

Complex sales with multiple stakeholders is far more complicated than simple sales for a consumer application. Long sales cycles and complex bidding practice...

Facilitation Guides - Setting Personal & Team Goals

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through the process of setting, measuring, and...

Sales Guide Template (.docx)

A comprehensive sales guide including email templates, checklists and exercises to prepare you and your team for a successful repeatable sales process. This ...

Sales Guide Template (google doc)

A comprehensive sales guide including email templates, checklists and exercises to prepare you and your team for a successful repeatable sales process. This ...

Customer Segmentation for Complex Sales (B2B)

Larger organizations require more stakeholders to close a sale. Understanding the differences between Economic Buyers, Technical Buyers, Evangelists, and Use...

Setting Personal & Team Goals

Goal-setting is an important step before any major journey. Defining effective goals allows you and your team to make progress and then measure it. This work...

Corporate Innovation Labs: A Case Study on DHL’s Startup Lab

Corporate innovation labs engage founders and participants across professional boundaries to bring startup innovation techniques into a corporate environment...

The Real Startup Book (Amazon Kindle)

A large, crowdsourced compilation of inquiry methods (i.e. experiment and research techniques) from lean practitioners worldwide. Every method has a short de...

Monster Project Cards

A fun deck of cards to help explain why some projects seems easy and some seem outright impossible. Useful for running group discussions.

Plinkromatic

A simple game that explains the principles of innovation funding. As the VP of innovation you allocate your budget and make go no go decisions to maximize ROI.

Innovation Board Judging Template

A very basic template for judging Intrapreneur startup pitches. It is meant for early stage projects and judges without extensive innovation experience. It s...

IDEA Template

A basic template for creating simple pitches for those new to innovation and ideation. Only contains three elements to focus the concept on a customer centri...

Customer Persona Framework

A persona template to break your real and potential customer base into smaller, more useful groups. These groups are defined by various behavioral characteri...

Financial (and Mission Impact) Modeling

Every entrepreneur needs to understand how to create a basic financial model of their business. This module teaches you the most important elements to model ...

Experiment Types: The Real Startup Book

After identifying a clear business question, we need to identify the right method to gather data that will answer that question. This module helps navigate t...

Jobs to Be Done Template

Use the Jobs to Be Done framework to empathize with your target customers. This is a simple template to help define a job to be done by your target customer.

Learning Culture Part II: How to Get the Best Out of Everyone

In a previous post, UnLearning to Lead/learning culture I wrote about the benefits of intent-based leadership — the idea that managers should empower their t...

Innovation and Portfolio Management

Why don't stage gates work? Why doesn't spending more money on R&D lead to more innovation? How can I drag my company into the future? This module dives i...

Paper Prototyping: How TenTune Harnessed the Power of the Pencil

When Vladimir Horbovanu met Yiyo Guerra in 2012 at Hackers and Founders in Monterey, Mexico, he found a kindred spirit. Guerra, a music producer, wanted to b...

Kromatic Innovation Ecosystem Booklet

The pace of innovation is constantly accelerating, threatening to disrupt every industry that doesn’t disrupt itself first. Maintaining a healthy innovation ...

Innovation Metrics – What Should Innovation Programs Measure?

“What are the one or two innovation metrics that you need to keep a corporate innovation program alive? Most corporations are made up of execution experts, q...

Innovation Portfolio Management – Principles Before Tools

Martin Kupp is an associate professor for entrepreneurship at ESCP Europe in Paris and a visiting professor at the ESMT European School of Management and Tec...

Our New Lean Template (and Why You Shouldn’t Use It)

It’s been five years since we first published the Learn S.M.A.R.T. template for recording experiment results, and since then we’ve updated it a few times. Mo...

Our New Lean Template (and Why You Shouldn't Use It)

Every company is different and requires a unique business model. Our Lean Experiment template can give you something solid to build yours on.

Sprint Retrospective Ideas – Go with the Power of Retrospectives

There are few skills in life as valuable as the capacity to learn from our mistakes. In every facet of our daily existence — our education, our relationships...

Fear and the Innovation Sandbox, Part 1

Fear is a natural chemical process. Long before we learned to spark campfires and paint on cave walls, our brains knew how to recognize and react to dangers ...

Elmo Acronym – The Majesty of Elmo

In the past few months, Elmo has been making frequent appearances in our office. He can be seen here in our supply caddy which we bring to every in-person me...

How Asking Works: A Crash Course in Customer Discovery Questions

A customer discovery interview is a sea voyage for which there is no map. At any moment, we may crash into an awkward pause, be devoured by a bias lurking ju...

What a Journalist Can Teach Lean Startups about Customer Interviews

Over the past 20 years, I’ve interviewed hundreds of people for books and magazine features — Nobel laureates, combat veterans, CEOs, refugees, Grammy winner...

User Interview Questions – How a Focus On Storytelling Can Solve OUR Pain Points

Many of the problems with discovery interviews can be minimized by paying attention to the stories our customers are telling us rather than the logistics of ...

Customer Discovery Interviews Part 1: Focus on Storytelling

Every product has a brand story. Whether it’s a slick campaign cooked up by a PR agency to help build a connection with buyers, or just the history and aesth...

Intent-Based Leadership – UnLearning to Lead

I recently had the pleasure of attending a beta-test workshop by Barry O’Reilly based on his new book Unlearn.

Innovation Ecosystem Map

A template on how to map out your ecosystem and identify obstacles to innovation that are holding your ecosystem back.

How Do I Know When I’m Done with Customer Discovery Process?

We’ve planned and executed our customer discovery process like George Clooney pulling off a casino heist. We’ve perfected every detail through three rounds o...

Learn S.I.M.P.L.E. Template

This template guides you through the four basic steps of a designing an experiment so you can generate the most useful information to make valuable decisions...

S.I.M.P.L.E. before S.M.A.R.T. – A Guide to Smart Business Experiments

If you’re a regular reader, you may know that we have a somewhat complicated template for designing effective business experiments. You may also know that we...

Value Proposition Comprehension Testing - How To Guide

When conversion rates on a landing page or sales page are low, sometimes it just means the page isn't well written. To improve conversion rates, run a compre...

Value Proposition & Comprehension Testing

Creating a compelling product or service for the customer starts with a compelling value proposition. If a customer can't understand what's being sold, they ...

Storyboarding & Metrics

Qualitative data and quantitative data do not exist in opposition. Qualitative data from UXers should not compete with the quantitative data product owners n...

Project Management & Roadmapping

Managing a series of experiments aimed at discovering a business model is different from managing the execution of a known strategy. The goal in both cases i...

Innovation Ecosystem Triage

Innovation Ecosystems are complex, and they challenge some of the traditional models of R&D and innovation. A holistic view of how culture, people, and proce...

Customer Segmentation for Simple Sales (B2C)

Demographics used to be a marketer’s only tool, but it's insufficient for early-stage customer discovery, and almost useless for designing user experience. N...

Business Model Risk Prioritization

All innovation projects come with risks, and successful businesses know how to navigate them. This module covers how to brainstorm and prioritize risks with ...

Innovation Culture & Group Behavior

How can startup culture be maintained when growing the company? How can existing companies bring startup culture into their teams? Maintaining an innovative ...

Risk Evaluation Template

A template to analyze risks (including moral hazard) to experiments and brainstorm ways to mitigate them.

Customer Discovery Note Taking Template

A note taking template for live customer discovery interviews. Best printed out and used with a pen for in person interviews.

Customer Discovery Note Taking Template (Google Doc)

A simple template for taking notes for a customer discovery call in a collaborative Google Doc. Best used for over the phone or video calls, not face to face.

Lean, Agile, & UX Principles

Lean Startup was born from a need for companies to innovate in high-risk environments in constantly changing markets. Like its predecessor, Agile Software De...

Customer Discovery & Debriefing

There is nothing more impactful to your early-stage business model than truly understanding the person you are building for and selling to. This interactive ...

Guest Post: Market Opportunity Navigator by Sharon Tal-Itzkovitch

(Dr. Sharon Tal is co-author of Where To Play, and creator of the Market Opportunity Navigator, a simple and solid framework that is helping thousands of ent...

Strategy of Innovation vs. Innovation Strategy

Shareholders and board members are demanding a vision for the future and an innovation strategy to get there. Regardless of whether the company is public or ...

Guest Post: Facilitation Skills Training For Lean Startup

(Nick Noreña is a coach at Kromatic, and spends most of his time working with teams and organizations to help them implement lean startup techniques in their...

33 Steps for Corporate Innovation…you won’t believe what happens next!

When it comes to something as predictable as innovation (especially corporate innovation!), we already have the knowledge to craft a one-size-fits-all soluti...

Reverse Mentoring: What Millennials Can Teach Executives and Managers

Large companies find it difficult to share new ideas, and nearly impossible to test and implement them. Small, scrappy startups seem to have the upper hand w...

Building on the Grit and Growth Mindset

It’s a tiny sprout that grew from some leaves that had fallen off the rather warped succulent behind it. (The one that looks like it’s reaching out to say he...

Organizational Culture Case Study: Lean Experiments with Radical Candor

Organizational Culture Case Study: When a member of your team recommends a book with the subtitle “Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity,” you shou...

B2B Startup Sales: A Lean Approach

(Sander Gansen is the Chairman of the Board of Robotex, the world’s biggest robotics festival based in Talinn, Estonia, and was one of the founders of Shipit...

Innovation Metric – In Defense of Experiment Velocity

As corporate innovation gets more trendy, businesses are keen to put clear KPIs in place to measure the effectiveness of innovation teams and hold them accou...

Ten Monster Projects That Will Kill Your Career As an Intrapreneur

We can be entrepreneurial and still get a paycheck…or that’s what they claim. “I’m an intrapreneur!” is the new rallying cry inside corporations.

Guest Post: Want to know Corporate Innovation definition? Avoid These Three Pitfalls

(Valerie Vacante is the Founder of Collabsco, a strategy and innovation firm based in Austin, Texas. She leads cross-functional teams to create meaningful, c...

How Diversity Can Drive Innovation? – Innovation & Ecosystem

How diversity can drive innovation? A lot of tours come through Silicon Valley full of CEOs, CTOs, and board members who want to figure out what makes the re...

Why Meritocracy Doesn’t Work

Reading the mystery Googler’s anti-diversity manifesto really pissed me off. The least of the problems was his terrible use of footnotes.

Learn S.M.A.R.T. Template

A detailed experiment template to help you design and document S.M.A.R.T. experiments and research. (S.M.A.R.T. = Smart, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Ti...

Measuring Innovation | Iteration Time = Time to Learn, Not Time to Build

We should remind ourselves that iteration time is a critical aspect of starting a new business, and there are a few key misconceptions that we may have been ...

Guest Post: Introducing The Customer Happiness Canvas

(Andy Cars is the founder of Lean Ventures, an innovation strategy consultancy based in Stockholm, Sweden. Andy is often hired by large companies to support...

Value Proposition Comprehension Test

When conversion rates on your landing page or sales page are low, sometimes it just means the page isn't well written. To improve conversion rates, try value...

Importance = Business Impact * Uncertainty

It may seem silly, but how we define “important” defines how we spend our days. Teams can get stuck in endless meetings where we debate what’s important with...

Landing Page Testing – 6 Reasons Your Conversion Rate is Zero

Landing page testing- Nothing is worse that abandoning a good idea because a landing page test ended with zero % conversion rate. That’s called a false negat...

Customer Profile Template: Cheat Sheet

A customer profile template is a detailed visual and written representation of the target early customer segment. When you are building a customer persona, y...

Guest Post: 5-Steps to Lean Startup Prioritization That Actually Works

(This is a guest post by Dan Toma, an Accelerator Manager and Coach, and author of the upcoming The Corporate Startup Book. You can find Dan on Twitter, Link...

How Many Customer Interviews are Enough to Verify Your Assumptions

(This is a guest post by Luke Szyrmer, a Product Manager and Consultant, and author of the just released Launch Tomorrow, a book on the use of paid advertisi...

Guest Post: A Lean Startup Pitch to Investors

(Lean Startup Pitch: Andy Cars, founder of Seedcap and Lean Ventures, helps startups with strategy, business development, lean startup and fundraising, and l...

Actioning a Customer Interview Debrief

This is Part 2 of a two-part blog post on effectively preparing and running customer interviews, and using the data you gather. Check out Part 1 here.

Customer Conversation Insights Template (Google Sheet)

This template will help you organize your customer discovery interview notes into actionable insights.

Real Startup Book: Latest Update

Since the Real Startup Book is under Creative Commons, anyone will be able to use, remix, and rehash what we come up with under the terms of that license. If...

Preparing a Discovery Template for Customer Interviews

This post is the first in a two-part series on making sense of the qualitative data we get from talking with customers. Part 1 focuses on what you can do bef...

Real Startup Book: 2nd Update

Since the Real Startup Book is under Creative Commons, anyone will be able to use, remix, and rehash what we come up with under the terms of that license. If...

Concierge vs. Wizard of Oz Prototyping

There are two lean startup methods that are often confused with one another. As a result, they’re often misused: Concierge test and Wizard of oz prototyping

Concierge MVP: Why You Should Experiment with User Onboarding

(Concierge MVP- Kevin Dewalt, Serial Founder, is constantly helping startups 1-to-1. When he’s not angel investing or playing golf, he’s always available to ...

Value Creation – In a World with No Technology Or Data…

My good friend and longtime Lean Startup Circle organizer and volunteer Spike Morelli (who has great office hours) gave me a wonderful book and card for my b...

The Real Startup Book Update

The response was overwhelming. 38 people expressed interest in helping and most of them weren’t interns…they were real practitioners like Sean K Murphy, an O...

Lean vs Agile – Interview with Sam McAfee

(Sam McAfee is the Chief Technology Officer of POPVOX and author of Startup Patterns. I reached out to chat about his approach on Lean, startups and teamwor...

The ROI of Innovation – What Is it?

As product managers, we are often asked a single question when we propose a new product: What’s the Return on Investment (ROI)? What’s the ROI of innovation?...

Putting User Insights Into Context

(This is a guest post by Michael Bamberger. He is the co-founder of Alpha UX, a real-time user insights platform for enterprise product teams. I reached out ...

Entrepreneurship Degree: Ask the Right Questions

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

One Lean Startup Experiment Per Week

“Go fast” is one of the principles of running a lean startup experiment. The faster we go around the Build-Measure-Learn loop, the faster we validate our bus...

In Defense of the Hi.P.P.O

Hi.P.P.O stands for the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. It’s a time honored way of making decisions which goes back centuries.

The Complete Team

In Silicon Valley, the common sense wisdom used to be that engineers were the most critical team members. The good ones were rare and hard to come by. Someti...

Lean Startup Jobs – Interns Needed!

You may know I’ve been slowly, slowly, slowly working on a Creative Commons project called the Startup Real Book to help startup figure out what type of expe...

Actionable Metrics vs. Fail Condition – To the Pain!

Last week I wrote about the difference between an assumption and a hypothesis and Steven Diebold wrote a great response. Steve schooled me on a few topics an...

Assumption vs. Hypothesis – to the Death!

Something has been irritating us: The startup community uses the words assumption and hypothesis interchangeably.

“Which Experiment Should We Run?” – 8 minute video

Figuring out which experiment or research we should run starts by laying out our assumptions and learning priorities. The Real Startup Book helps us organize...

Innovation Board Game – Interview with Simen Fure Jørgensen

(Simen is the creator of Playing Lean, the board game about Lean Startup that is now live on Kickstarter. He’s the CEO of Iterate, a Norwegian consultancy th...

Generative Research: Picnic in the Graveyard

Generative Research- What features should we build? What’s the feature set for our MVP? There are a lot of questions we need to answer before we write a sing...

Comprehension vs. Commitment

I love smoke tests. They’re a great way of testing whether or not there is any serious demand for our value proposition.

Startups Working with Large Companies & B2B MVP

(This is a guest post by Sean Murphy, who coaches early stage technology firms for B2B MVP. You can find Sean on Twitter, LinkedIn or on his blog.)

Lean Healthcare – Interview with Mark Graban

(Mark Graban is an internationally-recognized expert in the field of “Lean Healthcare,” as a consultant, author, keynote speaker, and blogger. I reached out ...

Innovation Workshop Facilitation: Cheat Sheet

Lean in Corporate Startup – Interview with Jay Badenhope

Jay Badenhope (Senior Product Manager of JustAnswer) leads product teams that experiment and build things to solve meaningful customer problems. I reached o...

Business Card Fishbowl Leads = Sales Leads

(Business card Fishbowl- This is a guest post by Sean Murphy, who coaches early stage technology firms. You can find Sean on Twitter, LinkedIn or on his blog.)

Untangling B2B Sales Goals and Objectives – Lean Sales Start with Goals

When it comes to B2B sales, our ability to set concrete sales goals and objectives is lacking. Even when we make a concrete sales funnel, we often have a vag...

The Real Startup Book

The Real Startup Book is a large, crowdsourced compilation of research and experiment inquiry methods from lean practitioners worldwide. Every method has a s...

Business Model Canvas for UX

This is a modified template based on the Business Model Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder. This will help you break down the user experience by detailing the c...

The 4 Types of B2B Persona

(B2B Persona- This is a guest post by Kenny Nguyen, who has spent the last six years helping B2B companies with marketing and sales. He describes himself as ...

Opportunity Insight Tool

Quick and dirty reference chart to prioritize your sales leads.

Innovation Methods: What Type of Lean Startup Experiment Should I Run?

When I was studying marketing I had an arms length list of research techniques like conjoint analysis, surveys, and focus groups. After I read Four Steps to ...

Product/Market Fit Storyboard

A template for designing early-stage user experience to achieve Product / Market fit. Based on the Business Model Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder, this produ...

The Future of Lean Product Development and UX

(This is a guest post by Rich Mironov, who coaches product executive and lean product development/owner teams. He wrote The Art of Product Management. You ca...

Templates Suck, Here’s Our Lean Startup Template

Every few weeks, someone asks us if there’s a lean startup template that they should use to define their experiments…and we say no.

Startup Culture – Interview with Kevin Dewalt

Startup culture- Kevin Dewalt (Serial Entrepreneur) is constantly helping startups 1-to-1. When he’s not angel investing, playing golf or (allegedly) manglin...

Observer-Expectancy Effect – Customer Development & UX

(This is a guest post by Dan Toma, Senior Innovation & Product Manager at Deutsche Telekom AG and author of the upcoming The Corporate Startup Book. You can ...

The Ultimate Guide to Running a Lean Startup

Stop fucking around reading posts with titles like “The Ultimate Guide to Running a Lean Startup” and start running experiments…NOW.

Straw Man Lean Enterprise Book

In my last post, I criticized adoption of the term Lean Enterprise and was accused of making a straw man lean enterprise book argument.

Lean Enterprise & Innovation Ecosystems

The idea that an enterprise-scale company with tens of thousands of employees can be as swift and nimble as a startup is enchanting.

Earlyvangelist Criteria Applies to Customers and Users – Product/Market Fit

(Earlyvangelist Criteria- This is part of a series of posts about testing product/market fit. You can download the Product/Market Fit Storyboard here.)

Customers and Causality – Customer Analysis

(Customer Analysis- This is part of a series of posts about testing product/market fit. You can download the Product/Market Fit Storyboard here.)

How to Build a Minimum Viable Product

How to Build a Minimum Viable Product- (This is part of a series of posts about testing product/market fit. You can download the Product/Market Fit Storyboar...

False Positives and Product Market Fit Survey – How do we test for it?

(This is part of a series of posts about testing product/market fit. You can download the Product/Market Fit Storyboard here. If you’re in San Francisco, you...

Agile Transformation – Adopting the Lean Hype Cycle

It has another, more famous name that those who have worked for enterprises will recognize, the hype cycle.

The Rudder Fallacy – Adopting Lean Startup Principles

It’s an overused analogy so let’s skip the obvious parts…. I’d like to talk about the rudder. And I’d like to talk to you, the team leader.

Lean Enterprise Anti-Pattern: Why agile doesn’t work

More and more enterprise scale companies are drinking the lean Kool Aid and starting to implement Lean Startup methodology. In doing so, they are failing at ...

The One Minute Retrospective

When we try and adopt a new paradigm it’s hard to differentiate tactics like “use a business model canvas instead of a 60 page business plan” and the princip...

Living Lean Startup

There’s a difference between using a lean tactic like concierge testing, a smoke test, or a business model canvas and really living lean.

Business Model Canvas for Puppies (part II)

When I last left off, the product/market fit side of the intrepid Puppies-as-a-Service Business Model Canvas was done.

12 Random Tips For Practicing Customer Development

Customer development is hard. It takes work to get it right and you’ll always be improving your technique. Here are a few pithy tips I like to keep in my hea...

Triangulating User Experience with Lean Startup Tools

I’m a massive fan of Customer Development, Steve Blank’s fantastic contribution to creating new businesses. Steve frequently reminds us to “Get Out of the Bu...

Business Model Canvas Example (for Puppies) – Part I

As some of you may know, TaskRabbit launched a new business model canvas example on April 1st, 2012: Puppies-as-a-Service

Product Development Life Cycle – The Risk of Building the Wrong Stuff

In a lean business model, we need to manage our risks. We sound very intelligent when we do this, but it occasionally leads to incredibly stupid behavior.

Business Model Canvas for User Experience

Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas is the tool of choice for a quick, one page dashboard of your business hypotheses. It very much appeals to the ...

Business Model Canvas Iteration, and Marshmallows

I have a love hate relationship with Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas. Steve Blank uses it brilliantly in his Lean Launchpad class, I’ve had les...

What is User Experience?

As a product guy who is constantly trying to dig deeper into user experience (UX) and user experience research, I’ve been asking myself how I define UX. So h...

Cheat Sheet: Pivot Business

Example: Zoom-In Pivot Paypal originally supported payments via PDA as well as the web. After discovering their customers were primarily using email, they dr...

Cheat Sheet: Business Model Canvas

” Unless you have tested the assumptions in your business model first, outside the building, your business plan is just creative writing.” – Steve Blank

Ability to Learn Quickly – Iteration

A team has 10,000 visitors each day, but can only iterate once per week. Additional marketing may increase sales, but will not increase learning.

Minimum Viable Product Template – Cheat Sheet

A minimum viable product is that activity which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. The ...

Finding And Solving Customer Pains – Problems Don’t Exist

I have long held the belief that entrepreneurs should stop talking about abstract solutions and frame their pitches in terms of solving real problems, but I ...

Lean Startup Machine – 10 Most Effective Tips and Tricks

I was at Lean Startup Machine in New York last weekend. (LSM is a 48 hour excursion into lean startup techniques created by Trevor Owens to push your boundar...

Build Measure Learn vs. Learn Measure Build

In 2009 I saw Kent Beck speak for the first time at the very first Lean Startup Conference. Back then it was called the “Startup Lessons Learned” Conference....

Minimum Viable Experience: User Experience is Not a Feature

Minimum viable experience- Is anyone else out there sick of signing up for on-line products that don’t do what they promised?

Lean Startup vs. Visionary Entrepreneur

At the risk of rehashing an argument, there is an ongoing misconception that creating a company under a lean startup approach is incompatible with a big entr...

Taxonomy of the Lean Startup Anti-Pivot

Startup Pivot: Pivoting has been up and down the Gartner Hype Cycle at least twice now. Sometimes it’s an accurate term to describe what entrepreneurs have t...

Minimum Viable Founding Team > Minimum Viable Product

Minimum Viable Founding team- Dharmesh Shah often puts out some great articles so I was pleased to read one on Choosing a Minimum Viable Co-founder. Having s...

Pivoting on Investor Feedback a.k.a Beware of Startup Mentor

Investors, startup mentor, advisors, and other experts are great to talk to. They’ll offer valuable insight on market sizes, suggest great customer acquisiti...

Innovation Culture: “Who Gets Shot”

Innovation Culture- I read a blog post by Lance Weatherby that epitomized everything I think is stereotypically wrong in large organizations and was worth co...

Top 3 Ways to Fail at Customer Development

The customer confirmed all of our hypotheses! We’re awesome! I mean really, who wouldn’t want a square disco ball? Let’s go build it!

The 3 Best Usability Testing Tools for Mockups and Wireframes

I’ve used quite a few, including Balsamiq, Photoshop, omnigraffle, and even MS Word. I’ve come to a pretty strong opinion on the best tools for the job:

Customer Personas for Customer Development

You’ve probably heard about them before, and you might have even seen a talk about how to draw silly little cartoons about your target customer.

Iconic Innovation | Humanity’s Greatest Innovation

Man’s greatest innovations are the peaceful periods of history that make all other innovations possible.

13 Tactics and Tips for Running Meetings – Growth Board

I recently ran across an old guide to running meetings- growth board that I wrote for a larger company and realized that despite being created for a very spe...

Three Lean Transformation to Live By

One of the first projects I got involved in when I moved to San Francisco was a lean startup bootcamp for the TechBA program called “Build or Die!”. It was a...

Market Validation – How do you validate your startup idea with customers?

My favorite question to ask is usually the simplest one to verify. Ask a simple pain point question such as, “Do your feet hurt?”

Why is Cyber Squatter a Bad Word? Value Creation In Entrepreneurship

startupSQUARE attracted (and still attracts) a lot of interesting exchanges. In my habit of responding to as many as possible I often say stupid things. Whet...

Startup Weekend Lesson Learned #2 – Steve Blank get out of the Building

At the last Startup Weekend (#swmobile) the team I joined was called KissMobs. As far as I’m aware, we are the only Startup Weekend team ever to finish the w...

Reverse Customer Development a.k.a. Thank God for Earlyvangelist

What does earlyvangelist mean? This week I was incredibly excited to be ambushed at Startup Waffles by a couple of users who told me how many things we neede...

$3.95? We’re Rich! – Learn to Test Business Model First

You have earned an affiliate fee of 3.95 USD for the sale (ID:5777670-686= 2856) of Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustDev eBook on Thu May 27 2010 23:52:3= 9 MST.

Two Sided Marketplace-Customer Development with Network Effects

How does customer development differ with regards to products which require a network effect to be useful (two sided marketplace)?

Top Takeaway – Startup Lessons Learned for Team Alignment

On April 23rd I was able to go to the Startup Lessons Learned for Team Alignment Conference and had my world rocked.

Wizard of Oz Prototype Example to Improve The User Experience

In the past few weeks we’ve had the typical ups and downs of every startup. We’ve let in a number of alpha users, got another hundred signed up thanks to a v...

The Taxonomy of the Lean Startup Pivot

(Warning: this post may be highly theoretical / geeky. If you’re looking for the more amusing Taxonomy of the Lean Startup Anti-Pivot, it’s here.)

Customer Development: Fight or Flight

Motivations are unimportant if you happened to be B.F. Skinner. But since he’s dead let’s assume you’re not him. Before we can talk about customer developmen...

How to Create a Prototype – Clever Hans and Photoshop Iteration

How to create a prototype- It’s been over two weeks since we released a bare bones alpha of our site and started letting people in one at a time. Since then ...

How to Do Customer Discovery – Development Practice

How to do customer discovery? I’ve discovered a great new method of growing bigger ears. Ready? Wait for it… go listen to sales pitches from startup consulta...

Evaluative Research Of Customer Development Mistakes

I realized today that I have been taking the lean startup / customer development axiom of “talk to customers” far too literally.While the quality of my feedb...

Principles of Management – Controlled Burns and Firebreaks

Principles of management- As startupSQUARE closes in on it’s first friends and family release the work is piling up and I’m reminded of the need to develop f...

Innovation Investment – Bad Economies are Great for Business

Note: We’d like to take a moment to welcome Carmen Neghina, our intern extraordinaire and author of this post, to the startupSQUARE.com team. Yay Carmen! Tha...

Someone Please Write a Blog about Minimum Viable Strategic Options

Watching Dave McClure‘s presentation today, I started to think about how a lot of the lean startup and customer development folks talk about creating the Min...

Startup Team Building – Right Team / Right Market

This New Year’s Eve, I’m resolving to work on the most important part of my own startup, the team called, startup team building.