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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)
Type
Blog Posts & Articles (192)
Games & Tools (3)
Workshops (29)
How To Guides (5)
Coaching & Facilitation Guides (27)
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Blog Post
NEW
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...
Blog Post
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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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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.
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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.
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
What Is Innovation Accounting?
Innovation Accounting sounds like one of those semi-humorous oxymorons like “accurate rumors,” “the rules of anarchy,” or “airline schedules.”
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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...
Blog Post
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 ...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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.
Resource
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...
Blog Post
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...
Resource
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...
Resource
Startup Poker Rules
Try our game of Startup Poker, where you can practice matching your business model to your market.
Workshop
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 ...
Blog Post
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...
Resource
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 ...
Resource
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
Resource
Sales Call Note Taking Template
A detailed note taking template best used for video or voice sales calls.
Blog Post
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...
Resource
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...
Blog Post
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 ...
Blog Post
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 ...
Resource
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...
Resource
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 ...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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FEATURED
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 ...
Resource
FEATURED
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...
Resource
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...
Blog Post
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...
Resource
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...
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Learning Journey Mad Lib Template
Coaches use this template when helping someone unlearn something, which is often the first step to teaching them something.
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Exercise Facilitator Guide
Use this template to plan and execute an effective learning exercise.
Blog Post
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...
Resource
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...
Resource
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...
Blog Post
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...
Resource
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.
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Innovation Project Evaluation Worksheet
Use this template to consistently apply decision criteria when allocating budget to an innovation project.
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Innovation Process Checklist
Use and modify this checklist as a benchmark against which to measure innovation investment and management decisions.
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Stage Gate Process Criteria Template
This is a basic innovation funnel template for designing your stage gates process based on objective, resources and unknowns.
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Basic Portfolio Allocation Template - Google Sheets
A basic template to help you plan and allocate budget for your innovation portfolio.
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Basic Innovation Funnel Template - Google Sheets
A simple template that you can use to design and model innovation funnels.
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Value Proposition Statement Mad Lib Template - Google Slides
A simple template that you can use to explain your value proposition.
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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...
Resource
Innovation Tactics & Events
This is a short list of innovation enabling methods designed to counteract innovation blockers in your ecosystem.
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Innovation Obstacle Map
A template on how to identify and map out obstacles to innovation that are holding your ecosystem back.
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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.
Resource
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.
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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...
Resource
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...
Resource
Facilitation Guides - Value Proposition Tests
This slide deck contains instructions and notes for coaches to prepare for and guide others through testing value propositions.
Blog Post
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...
Resource
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 ...
Blog Post
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.
Article
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Version History
Article
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Contributors
Article
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How to Use This Book
Article
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Who Is This Book For?
Resource
FEATURED
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Resource
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...
Article
Index of Methods
Article
Index of Questions
Article
Scorecards
A scorecard is an evaluative decision-making or prioritizing shortcut, often done in a spreadsheet.
Article
Off-Brand Testing
Off-brand testing is a technique that helps established companies run experiments while minimizing risk to their brand equity.
Article
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...
Article
Wizard of Oz
The Wizard of Oz (WOZ) test involves one or more individuals simulating fully functioning product features without the use of technology.
Article
Usability Testing
Usability testing involves observing people trying to complete a series of tasks while using an interactive product.
Article
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...
Article
Paper Prototyping
Quickly test a solution idea by simulating user-product interactions using paper drawings and cutouts.
Article
Net Promoter Score Survey
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) identifies customer loyalty to the brand or product.
Article
Dashboards
A dashboard is a simple view of product metrics that displays information about the general health and viability of the product.
Article
Solution Interview
The solution interview builds on our research around the problem and proposes a solution to see how potential customers react.
Article
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...
Article
Dogfooding
Dogfooding is simply using the product as if we were the customer and experiencing it firsthand.
Article
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.
Article
Concierge Test
Concierge is a technique to test the solution of a customer problem by manually performing tasks as a service.
Article
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...
Article
Competitor Analysis
Competitive analysis is very much a secondary research method that we can perform online relatively quickly and comprehensively.
Article
Ask an Expert
Founders ask experts for opinions, then choose whether or not to act on those opinions.
Article
Analog/Digital
This technique helps decouple the risks around physical delivery of a product from a digital component of the product.
Article
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.
Article
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...
Article
Value Proposition Test - Pre-Sales
Pre-sales involves accepting payment in exchange for a promise to deliver the value proposition at a later date.
Article
Value Proposition Test - Pocket
This smoke test applies to physical goods or products with hardware components — at minimum a mobile phone.
Article
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...
Article
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.
Article
Value Proposition Test - Flyer
Flyers serve as placeholders for conversations that need to happen.
Article
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...
Article
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.
Article
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.
Article
Secondary Market Research
Secondary market research gathers and interprets available information about the target market, and includes published reports, newspaper articles, or academ...
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Comprehension Test
A comprehension test will evaluate whether or not the customer understands the marketing message explaining the value proposition.
Article
Closed-Ended Survey
Converge on what's relevant in great detail, particularly to customers or prospects.
Article
Open-Ended Survey
Fixed set of questions, usually via a mass-communication channel such as an email or website pop-up.
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Focus Groups
A small group discussion designed to rapidly gain customer feedback on a given topic.
Article
Experience Sampling
Get information about a participant's daily behaviors, thoughts, and feelings in real-time, or as close to it as possible.
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Data Mining
Data mining uses statistics from large amounts of data to learn about target markets and customer behaviors.
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Customer Discovery Interviews
Gain insight into customers' perspective, pain points, purchasing habits, and so forth.
Article
Contextual Inquiry
Combination of semi-structured interviews and observations done in the actual location where the problem occurs or the solution will be used.
Article
Tags and Other Frameworks
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Hypothesis Checklist
A sure way to keep our sanity is to start with a strong hypothesis to give the experiment structure.
Article
Generative vs. Evaluative
Do we have a clear hypothesis to evaluate or do we need to generate a clear idea?
Article
Problem vs. Solution
Do we need to learn about the problem (ie, market) or the solution (ie, product)?
Article
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
Resource
Value Proposition Statement Mad Lib Template
A simple template that you can use to explain your value proposition.
Resource
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...
Blog Post
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.
Resource
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.
Resource
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.
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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...
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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...
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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...
Workshop
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...
Workshop
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...
Workshop
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 ...
Workshop
Stakeholder Management
How can an innovation project avoid typical political hurdles of large companies? ifferent cultures, industry domains, and companies contain groups and i...
Workshop
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...
Workshop
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...
Workshop
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...
Workshop
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...
Workshop
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...
Workshop
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 ...
Workshop
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...
Workshop
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...
Workshop
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 ...
Workshop
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 ...
Resource
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...
Workshop
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...
Workshop
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 ...
Blog Post
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...
Resource
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...
Resource
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...
Resource
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...
Resource
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...
Workshop
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...
Workshop
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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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 ...
Workshop
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...
Workshop
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...
Blog Post
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...
Resource
FEATURED
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...
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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...
Workshop
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 ...
Workshop
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...
Resource
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.
Blog Post
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...
Workshop
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...
Blog Post
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...
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FEATURED
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 ...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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.
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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 ...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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 ...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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.
Resource
Innovation Ecosystem Map
A template on how to map out your ecosystem and identify obstacles to innovation that are holding your ecosystem back.
Blog Post
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...
Resource
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...
Blog Post
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...
Resource
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...
Workshop
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 ...
Workshop
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...
Workshop
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...
Workshop
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...
Workshop
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...
Workshop
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 ...
Workshop
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 ...
Resource
Risk Evaluation Template
A template to analyze risks (including moral hazard) to experiments and brainstorm ways to mitigate them.
Resource
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.
Resource
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.
Workshop
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...
Workshop
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 ...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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 ...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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.
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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.
Resource
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...
Blog Post
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 ...
Blog Post
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...
Resource
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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.
Resource
Customer Conversation Insights Template (Google Sheet)
This template will help you organize your customer discovery interview notes into actionable insights.
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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
Blog Post
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 ...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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?...
Blog Post
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 ...
Blog Post
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.”
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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.
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
Assumption vs. Hypothesis – to the Death!
Something has been irritating us: The startup community uses the words assumption and hypothesis interchangeably.
Blog Post
“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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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.
Blog Post
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.)
Blog Post
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 ...
Blog Post
Innovation Workshop Facilitation: Cheat Sheet
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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.)
Blog Post
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...
Resource
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...
Resource
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...
Blog Post
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 ...
Resource
Opportunity Insight Tool
Quick and dirty reference chart to prioritize your sales leads.
Blog Post
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 ...
Resource
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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.
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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 ...
Blog Post
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.
Blog Post
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.
Blog Post
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.
Blog Post
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.)
Blog Post
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.)
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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.
Blog Post
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.
Blog Post
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 ...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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.
Blog Post
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.
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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
Blog Post
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.
Blog Post
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 ...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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
Blog Post
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.
Blog Post
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 ...
Blog Post
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 ...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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....
Blog Post
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?
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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!
Blog Post
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:
Blog Post
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.
Blog Post
Iconic Innovation | Humanity’s Greatest Innovation
Man’s greatest innovations are the peaceful periods of history that make all other innovations possible.
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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?”
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
$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.
Blog Post
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)?
Blog Post
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.
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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.)
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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 ...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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...
Blog Post
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.