Last night I attended a great workshop by @scottsambucci Selling for the Lean Startup: How to Find Customers and Talk to Them
The workshop was great and I invite you to try and attend next time Scott is giving one. What I wanna focus on however is something orthogonal to it. During the event I was reminded of two things that are as obvious as they are often off people’s radar:
- The Lean principles are so much bigger than just Lean Startup
- Workshops are so incredibly more useful than talks
Now that I got that out there, lemme take a step back and explain.
Lean Principles
Rather often I’ve ran into people that when they hear Lean they think startups, and I mean literally, not even lean startups, just startups. It seems like Lean has become just another cool name for running a business.
When Scott put up this slide I thought to myself: yes, right there, Kaizen!
Kaizen is a term coming from the Lean philosophy meaning constant improvement and generally indicates changes made to a process in order to eliminate waste. And as you can guess by the definition it is not bound to any specific context.
Scott had a good example after another of how to apply the build-measure-learn pattern to the sales cycle. To me that was more than just a lesson on sales, it was a reminder of how versatile and useful Lean principles can be and how they apply to more than the often cited product development cycle.
Workshops > Talks
Between the LSC and a couple other groups I’ve been to about 12 talks and 7 workshops in the last 8 months and talking to other attendees the workshops scored way way higher. The thing is, nobody finds that surprising and yet next week I’m scheduled to attend another talk based event. Why are you doing this people?! A mix of hands on activities and opportunities for tailored content and direct feedback are the most useful combo for any kind of audience.
And don’t believe me, collect data about your events and improve over it, you know, adopt the Lean Principles.