Venture Design II: Iterating to Success

Most of us keep a to-do list of sorts, cross things off it, and consider our work done. New ventures (startups) are a little different- you may need to try several different angles and approaches before you hit on a winner. Crossing an item off your list, may not actually mean it’s really ‘done’. Successful innovators minimize the work and expense of each iteration so they can keep trying until they get the result the want, an approach popularized and improved by the Lean Startup movement.

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to structure the key assumptions underlying your venture and create efficient experiments to validate those assumptions.

TAKEAWAYS

• Hands-on experience looking at a new venture idea and structuring its uncertainty into specific assumptions (‘hypotheses’) that can be proven or disproven
• Know-how to distinguish between assumptions that are important vs. those that are truly strategic and ‘pivotal’
• Best practices for matching various types of assumptions with efficient experiments and established recipes for executing those experiments
• Understanding of how to create a low cost ‘minimum viable product’ to quickly prove in or disprove an idea

About the Venture Design Series

In this workshop series, you’ll learn a structured approach for successfully creating new products. This is a five-part program where you will learn how to use design-thinking and lean to articulate a testable product idea, then come back after two weeks of customer discovery to formulate your business model and action plan. For alumni of the workshop, there’s also a session III, Focusing & Validating Venture Progress.

By the end, you will know if your idea is worth the further investment of your time, and you will have learned a repeatable process for brainstorming and structuring new product and business ideas.

This class applies to entrepreneurs creating new ventures, ‘intrapreneurs’ working within existing companies, and coaches of product teams.