Monthly Roundup: 8 Resources to Check Out This August
In the spirit of back to school, our team is catching up on our summer reading (seriously, we have a monthly book club). We’ve learned through customer convos that you’re looking for new resources, too. Below are 8 to check out and share with your team.
But first, a shoutout to our friends at General Assembly, a business education powerhouse, who are giving away a pair of tickets to The Lean Startup Conference, and covering the trip to San Francisco to boot. Enter for a chance to win (and tell your friends!).
1 – Product Hunt’s Secret Weapons (Podcast)
Source: Lean Startup Co.
Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt, is interviewed by Heather McGough of Lean Startup Co. In this podcast, Hoover discusses the Product Hunt journey, how to scale an invite-only community, and his plans for expanding into new verticals.
2 – 731 Slack Users Reveal Why It’s So Addictive (Blog Post)
Source: Hiten Shah, co-founder at CrazyEgg and KISSmetrics
What makes Slack so popular? In the spirit of Lean Startup, Shah answers this question by talking to Slack’s users. While the results are interesting, the real story comes from his customer development and research process. We love how transparent he is about his research methods and encourage you to adapt them into your own.
3 – Speeding up JavaScript Test Time 1000X (Blog Post)
Source: Shyp
This post is for the engineers in our community. Learn how Shyp’s technical team cut down core API tests from 100 seconds to 100 milliseconds.
4 – Lean Startup Tools (Curated List)
Source: Product Hunt & Femgineer
Looking for Lean Startup tools to bring back to your team? Check out this list from Femgineer founder Poornima Vijayashanker who will be teaching a session on transforming ideas into software products at the November Lean Startup Conference.
5 – How to Calculate the Value of a Pivot (Blog Post)
Source: Chris DeNoia, consultant and startup advisor
Lean Startup practitioners know the value of learning milestones but are often unsure of how to measure success. This article breaks down a few different options, for different types of organizations.
6 – Places Make Us (Video)
Source: Christina Wodtke, consultant and startup advisor
We make places, and places make us back. In this keynote from Midwest UX, Lean Startup Conference speaker and mentor Christina Wodtke shares her best tips for designing in the ‘new’ digital world.
7 – Is Perfection the Enemy of the CMO’s Growth? (Blog Post)
Source: Dun and Bradstreet
An experienced startup founder, product leader and intrapreneur at Pivotal Labs, Janice Fraser has committed her entire career to helping companies innovate faster and get closer to their customers. In this interview, she shares entrepreneurial insights most relevant to enterprise CMOs as they strive to perfect their marketing.
8 – Practicing Lean When You’re Not a Startup (Podcast)
Source: Lean Startup Co.
Often there is a perception that Lean Startup methods are only for the inception phase of a product. The ‘startup’ part is a bit of a misnomer, it’s not meant to be literal. Companies of all sizes can benefit from the principles by adopting a more customer-centric approach and engendering a culture supporting build-measure-learn. In this podcast, the Lean Startup team speaks with Rahim Adatia, consultant and former director of mobile and presentation platforms at PayPal, who will share some of his experiences working with both startups and larger organizations to ship products using Lean methodologies.
Want to talk about what you’ve just read? You’ll make a great addition to the 2015 Lean Startup Conference community. Join us on November 16-19 at Fort Mason. Come away with new Lean Startup contacts and actionable takeaways that you can immediately apply at your company. Click here for all the details and to register now.