2012 Year in Review – Lean Startup Enterprise and Family

Posted by on Dec 27, 2012 in Personal | 4 comments

For me, I think this year should be dubbed “The Year of Lean Startup and family”. I tried my best to strike a balance between 34 trips and spending quality time with my family and friends. All things considered it was an incredible year for Maria, Miranda and I. My only wish is that 2012 did not include unexpectedly losing my mom to liver cancer.

In December of 2011, I moved from Intuit’s IT department into HR as a product manager for the Personal Growth and Development team. At that point I was armed with a basic set of product management skills, the right mindset and a few extremely smart and insightful mentors. Through my journey this year, I can honestly say I feel extremely confident as a product manager and look forward to being able to continue to move up the ranks quickly.

I believe this confidence comes primarily from my application of Lean Startup practices both inside and outside Intuit. In January I was asked to provide a “Tech Talk” inside Intuit for our development community. The goal was to give a high level overview of Lean Startup and how it applied Inside

DSC_3641.jpg

DSC_3641.jpg

Intuit. At that point Eric Reis was starting to do quite a bit of speaking for Intuit and many employees were still not making the connection between these “startup” ideas and how they apply inside of a multi-billion dollar enterprise like Intuit. The tech talk went great and it made me realize that there was a big opportunity in helping others to apply these concepts.

With that realization, I started investigating the possibility of having an event called Lean Startup Machine (LSM) come to Tucson for Intuit. Having been to the event myself about a year prior I knew it was an extremely high impact event. Through the founder I learned that someone else from Intuit was trying to bring them to San Diego. He was a fellow Innovation Catalyst named Ben Blank. We quickly decided to pilot our own version of the event with a few teams to see if we could create value for Intuit before deciding to pay $60k for LSM.

We had a total of 5 teams for our first Lean StartIN (Lean Startup in the Enterprise) event in San Diego. We were fortunate enough to be able to get Eric Reis to help us kick off the event via skype and Brant Cooper came in person. It was a huge success and the teams were thoroughly excited after the 2 days were over. Ben and I quickly jumped to run a second event in Mountain View.

This event had a total of 12 teams crammed into a small room (high energy!). We were able to get our CEO, Brad Smith and Luxr’s Janice Frasier to participate as judges for the event. Again, the teams accomplished more in 2 days that most Intuit teams accomplish in months! We knew we were on to something big.

After these two energizing events, Ben came up with the crazy idea to do a Lean StartIN World Tour! We would conduct 10 Lean StartIN events across 10 different Intuit sites over the course of 10 weeks. This would allow us to train 100 Intuit teams on Lean Startup and Rapid Experimentation. In early June we ran an updated and improved “pilot” event in Menlo Park just prior to the world tour.

This insane world tour significantly contributed to the 53,906 miles I travelled this year across 3 different countries. In addition to creating a bunch of great intrapreneur driven startups for Intuit, Ben and I learned a ton about the cultural differences between sites at Intuit, ways to effectively coach teams and get them out of the building QUICKLY!

As the article title notes, I tried my best this year to balance my busy work schedule with family time. Historically, I haven’t been very good at this and it seems like something that I’m constantly putting on my New Year’s resolution list. I did a decent job of balancing things this year, but due to the loss of my mom in September I had a little over a month of almost pure family time.

To support my brother, sister and I during the passing of my mom, my dad came out from Thailand for about 6 weeks. It was really incredible to have him around through all of that. He helped with anything and everything he could. I’m not sure that we could have made it through her passing, celebration of life and 2nd funeral (my great aunt decided to put on) without all of his love and support.

I don’t feel like I’m ready to write about the experience of losing my mom, but I can say that it has completely changed my outlook on life. I have actually started including family time in my schedule to ensure that it always happens. I’m intentionally trying to get work that allows me to travel to places on my bucket list. I’ve tried Karaoke and am trying to say yes to anything new that I haven’t attempted before. It seems like such a waste to say things like “I don’t do that” or “That’s not me”. It’s really as simple as saying “yes” and giving things a try.

I think this is best represented in what has happened this year at Gangplank Tucson. We successfully ran 2 Lean Launchpad events for a total of 17 different teams. The first class was quickly pulled together through a grass roots effort in the community in just under 2 weeks. If you’d like to know more, you can read about my lessons learned from putting that class together. Another project for Gangplank is to get our collaborative working space moved downtown. To support this effort I’ve been puttting together stories from our lean launchpad teams about what they have applied after the class and how it has changed their outlook on business. It is absolutely amazing to read some of those quotes.

My adventures this year with Intuit and Gangplank have opened my eyes to a skill that I didn’t realize I had. I have learned that I am a pretty good Lean Startup and Innovation coach. For anyone out there that wants to become an expert in something I would suggest you get a couple books, go get some practice and then start teaching others. This process worked incredibly for me over the last few years. I effectively immersed myself in Lean Startup coaching by teaching 300+ teams for Intuit, and 50+ teams outside Intuit this year.

Now that I’ve taken the time to look back I am amazed at how incredible 2012 was for us. There is absoultely no way I could have accomplished all of this without the help of my super-wife Maria and well behaved daughter Miranda, and hordes of smart people at Intuit, Gangplank, Startup Weekend and Lean Entrepreneur.

THANK YOU ALL for an incredible year, let’s rock 2013!

read more

Gangplank Tucson: Lean Launchpad – Lessons Learned

Posted by on Nov 28, 2012 in Business, Education | 0 comments

On May 12, 2012 Gangplank Tucson kicked off our first Lean Launchpad course. It was modeled after the course that Steve Blank has been teaching at Stanford and other schools. The goal is to help teach entrepreneurs how to use customer development to search for a business model that they can ultimately scale. The course is intended to be extremely fast paced and requires a large investment from the student teams.

For this first pilot course our intention was to jump in, execute and learn from it rather than planning like crazy and trying to get it “right”. Because of that we pulled together 5 teams and 5 mentors. The mentors were chosen based on availability and were not assigned to a single team.

Each week we would begin by reviewing the selected reading from The Startup Owner’s Manual and Business Model Generation books. Next, we would proceed to review the associated slides from Steve Blank’s slide share. Last, we would pair each team up with a mentor to help the teams determine what they should be testing for the next week.

After eleven weeks we had two teams that really stood out. The first team was Forward Intel which started the class with the belief that they would provide a suite of big data software and services. By the end of the course they had narrowed to a very specific problem of providing actionable recommendations to marketing firms based on their web, social and related data.

The second team was Verb Club who were designing a mobile route application specifically for climbers. Due to the fact that details about routes change constantly due to weather it is extremely important for climbers to have current information. The app would primarily be supported by advertising.

All in all the course had a great impact and we will definitely be running more of them very soon.

Lessons Learned

  • There is a huge need for this type of education in Tucson as we have lots of entrepreneurs starting new businesses, but no education that focuses on this first phase of business building.
  • Some entrepreneurs have a STRONG reality distortion field. We saw one of the teams which absolutely believed that their vision was reality. They focused completely on web data and refused to get out of the building and learn from their customers one-on-one.
  • There are lots of great coaches & mentors willing to help entrepreneurs in Tucson. I was amazed at the willingness of all of the mentors to jump in and spend their personal time coaching teams for free. Thank you all for paying it forward.
  • It is important to match mentors to teams as it increases accountability for both the teams and the mentor. Additionally I believe it will be important to match based on the industries of both.

Thanks to everyone who helped make this first course a success!!

 

read more

Conferences on Intrapreneurship, Innovation, Customer Development and Product Development

Posted by on Oct 21, 2012 in Business | 1 comment

I’m in the process of trying to find venues to continue to build my credibility around innovation, intrapreneurship and rapid experimentation.   Rather than keeping it to myself I thought I should share it here to help others.   If you know of any that I may have missed, please post them in the comments.

Upcoming Events: 

Here are a few 2013 conferences that will likely return in 2014:

 

Past Events:

read more

Lean Startup for Intrapreneurs (Podcast Episode)

Posted by on Sep 13, 2012 in Business | 0 comments

I had the pleasure of speaking with some of the folks (Drew Lesuer, Derek Neighbors and Roy van de Water) from Integrum Technology on their Agile Weekly Podcast.   We focused primarily on tips, tricks and pitfalls of applying Customer Development (CustDev) and Lean Startup methodologies inside of the enterprise.

I’d love your feedback, what tips do you have?  What issues do you run into?

read more

Gangplank Tucson Featured in Tucson Weekly

Posted by on Jun 20, 2012 in Business, Featured | 0 comments

Not quite sure what Gangplank Tucson does for the community or how we got started?  Check out my TQ&A interview with Mari Herreras inside the Tucson Weekly.  The article focuses on the answers to the following questions: :

  • What is Gangplank and where is it located?
  • How did I get involved with Gangplank?
  • What’s the connection between Bookmans and Gangplank?
  • How did Gangplank come to Tucson?
  • What type of events take place at Gangplank Tucson?

For the answers to these questions and to learn more information about Gangplank Tucson’s origination, read the full interview at Tucson Weekly.

read more

With Google+ plugin by Geoff Janes