Venture Design Session 1 @ Women’s Startup Lab (private)

This is a private event for the Women’s Startup Lab, part of a two part series.

In this event, we’ll cover the 1st and 2nd Venture Design modules:

Venture Design I ‘Achieving Customer Relevance’

Successful ventures are built on a strong foundation understanding of the customer. In this session you’ll learn actionable practices from the discipline of ‘design thinking’. These practices will teach you how to organize and focus your understanding of the customer in a vivid, compelling, and testable structure. We’ll close with techniques to go out and discover who your customer really is, what they really want, and how to successfully interact with them.

Takeaways

• Hands-on experience using personas, problem scenarios, alternatives and value propositions to structure your understanding of the customer
• Use of storyboards to operationalize your personas and think through life-of-the-customer and the customer journey with your product
• Techniques to structure customer interviews, acquire and engage subjects, run interviews and make decisions based on your results

Good For

• Making sure your product isn’t greeted by an echoing silence

Duration

120 minutes

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

Good For

• Making sure you know what you do every day matters and how to explain it to the boss

Duration

120 minutes