While a lot of the examples you hear about are in the consumer space, these principals are, of course, equally powerful in the B2B space. In this example, we’ll look at how the enterprise software company Leonid Systems (where I’m CTO) applied these principals across. The four parts to this are:
IDEATION: How Leonid used design thinking to develop its consulting practices and, based on what we learned there, our first set of software products.
PLANNING: How Leonid uses lean principals to focus its development of new and existing products. We’ll also look at Leonid through the popular “business model canvas”.
ORGANIZATION: How Leonid scaled up resources in proportion to the business, removing the need for investors.
DEVELOPMENT: How Leonid applies agile to its new and existing products.
A quick bit of background- This is one of three example companies I use on this site’s speaking page. If you’re interested, you can find introductory material on the four topics above in the concepts section of the speaking page.
NOTE ON VIDEOS: If you’re finding them too small, you can enlarge them by clicking on the dotted rectangle in the lower right corner.
IDEATION
The first video here describes how we arrived at our initial product set during the company’s first 3 years. The second describes two specific examples of how we learned from direct observation of users and applied that to the improvement of our products.
Overall product development (3:28):
Enhancements- dashboards and visual device management (5:23)
PLANNING
How we apply lean principals by formulating hypotheses and theses about our product sets (2:44):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCbrOr56Auw
The business model canvas as applied to Leonid and our financial planning trajectory (5:24):
ORGANIZATION
This video describes how we scaled up the organization and general recommendations on professional development for anyone that’s working or wants to work in a tech business (3:40):
DEVELOPMENT
This video describes our application of agile (1:26):
Talk back
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