Three Reasons Your Boss Should Send You to The Lean Startup Conference
We’ve heard your requests for information to help convince your bosses to send you to The Lean Startup Conference, December 8 – 12 in San Francisco. We know you have to justify not only the budget, but also the time away. This conference has an advantage to offer you: The time and money you spend attending will more than pay off when you’re immediately able to help your company build products more quickly and profitably.
Below are just a few benefits for employees of established companies in attending the Lean Startup Conference. Feel free to share with your boss–and once she or he says yes, register here.
1. Learn the key Lean Startup methods from experts
Lean Startup is a proven method for invigorating and sustaining innovation in established companies and in young startups alike. Recognizing that reality, this year’s conference includes a workshop, “Introducing Lean Startup in Your Corporation.” Led by Brant Cooper, author of The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets and an accomplished corporate coach, the session includes guest speakers from enterprise corporations, case studies from corporate entrepreneurs, and a real-world, hands-on exercise to help you truly learn and connect the ideas with your everyday work. This session is highly relevant for executive leadership teams, innovation groups and incubators, product managers and product teams, and functional teams such as HR and Finance.
If you’re brand new to Lean Startup, you’ll gain highly useful lessons from “Lean Startup 101,” a workshop lead by Janice Fraser, author of The Lean Product Book and expert entrepreneurship trainer. The session teaches you the key concepts–like MVPs, pivots, customer development, validated learning, product/market fit, innovation accounting and cross-functional teams–when to use these approaches in your company, and the mechanics of learning from customers and testing ideas.
2. Find out how to apply Lean Startup in your company through case studies and how-to sessions
Fostering innovation and a culture of entrepreneurship inside your corporation is key to success in today’s fast-moving markets. Corporations need managers and employees to work more quickly and effectively, and the conference has plenty of examples you can learn from. For instance, when employees at Telefonica—one of the largest mobile network providers in the world—wanted to experiment with a new handset idea, something very interesting happened. In their talk, “Lean Product Development in a Very Big Organization,” Susana Jurado and Mario Olano, Innovation Managers at Telefonica, tell a detailed and instructive story about their company’s experience.
In “How HP Shipped Faster–Much Faster,” Kathryn Kuhn discusses how her innovation team overcame slow release cycles and rigid team processes with calculated tradeoffs in order to speed up its product development cycle–bringing a complex product to market in a matter of months. In “Launch a New Product that Doesn’t Hurt Your Existing Brand,” Andrew Homeyer explains how his team at Rally Software launched a new product under a fresh brand and reached an entirely new customer segment. And, in “The Diesel Engine MVP,” Cory Nelson, Sr. Executive Product Manager at GE Distributed Power, talks with Eric Ries about how GE has used Lean Startup methods to reduce the risk of developing a new diesel engine—and did it more quickly than it had for similar products in the past.
Many corporate innovators find it challenging to convince leaders and/or coworkers to use entrepreneurial methods, especially in buttoned-up departments like accounting or legal. But Lean Startup principles can work in those areas, too, and the conference has sessions to show you how. For instance, in “Innovation Accounting,” David Binetti teaches product managers at established companies how to create an effective framework for getting corporate buy-in and measuring success against learning milestones, rather than inappropriate (and near-universally used) execution milestones. In “Turn Lawyers into Allies,” Sean Butler, Senior Corporate Counsel at Cisco, explains how you can actively reframe the roles of lawyers to transform the legal function into an asset rather than a innovation-blocking liability.
Oh, and we have talks on working within regulated industries. For example, Joanne Molesky of Thoughtworks explores balancing compliance and experimentation. And Balaji Srinivasan of Andreessen Horowitz talks about reinventing regulated industries.
3. Connect with peers and mentors at companies facing challenges similar to yours
It’s probably clear by now that The Lean Startup Conference isn’t for startup founders alone. Not only will speakers from corporations like Microsoft, Google and Disney share how Lean Startup principles work at their companies, but in addition, our Office Hours sessions–available to Platinum and Gold Passholders–give you a chance to sit down with speakers and select mentors for one-on-one conversations where you can discuss your most pressing challenges.
We also take extra care to make sure that you meet relevant attendees during breakout sessions, receptions, and dedicated dinners for corporate entrepreneurs at local restaurants. Attendees already registered hail from organizations like AARP, Adobe Systems, Andreessen Horowitz, AOL, BabyCenter, Capital One, Cisco, Constant Contact, Disney, Fidelity Investments, Gannett, GE, Genentech, GFK, GoDaddy, Google, Hewlett Packard, Intuit, LexisNexis, Macy’s, Microsoft, NASDAQ Private Market, O’Reilly Media, United Health Group, Pearson, Rackspace, Riot Games, SAP, Siemens, State Farm, Steelcase, Target, Twitter, and Viacom.
Conference attendees run the gamut of job titles, too. You’ll be surrounded by CEOs, CMOs, CIOs, CTOs, CFOs, engineers, HR, accountants, analysts, designers, strategists, marketers, business developers, product managers, IT, managers, operations, health care providers, UX designers, innovation & R&D leads, sales managers, coaches and professors. And not only are they coming from all over the country, but also from all over the world: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey.
Don’t miss the chance to learn about Lean Startup methods from the experts and bring its methods to your corporation. Register for the conference today.
PS. Here are just a few of our favorite talks on bringing Lean Startup principles to corporations from last year’s conference: