Simon Marcus@lycaonmarcus

Lean Startup was part of our effort to turn TLC into a learning organization.

Learning Organization: A group of people working together to collectively enhance their capacities to create results they

really care about. - Peter Senge

Qualities of a learning organization: • Help people forge meaningful relationships with coworkers• Support the development of individual skills• Create a culture that productively surfaces challenges• Ensure employees care about a company’s common vision• Encourage learning in every corner of the company

About Our Company:TLC is a 40-year-old firm that makes software for libraries. - Started in the 1970s, it was the first data company to

productize digital bibliographic records for libraries.- Built first-ever Windows-based library management

system

But by the mid-2000s… - Market was RFP-driven, and it was difficult to find

new space for innovation in the slow-to-change industry

- The ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’ was in full effect

First Steps Towards Innovation:- Jumped head-first into a Scrum implementation- Adopted practices including pairing, TDD, continuous

integration and deploying.- Released software frequently, in small batches

Eventually, we...- Reduced costs, increased sales and revenue- Started releasing software built in collaboration with

customers

When Scrum stopped being as useful, we transitioned to personal and team Kanban.

Using Lean and Kanban, teams reduced their standard workload by as much as 75%. By early 2012, our business was running very well.

With business stable, we decided to see if we could push our employees to the next level.

Our (hopeful) solution: Lean Startup Machine.

Lean Startup Machine is an intensive lean/agile bootcamp designed for entrepreneurs. But we decided to make our employees the first group ever to attend a LSM event as a corporate team.

© David Gaines/Flickr

The TLC offices are located in West Virginia – not exactly a bustling metropolis – so we opted to take a field trip to DC for our LSM experience.

Main challenge pre-event: getting TLC employees to come up with ideas they would be passionate about.

But, because we knew many ideas would change or be eliminated altogether during the LSM process, they had to be concepts they could survive the death of.

We created a three-day ideation process:- Designed to generate a large number of ideas in a

very short time- Wanted to maximize likelihood that people would

see things they liked in each others ideas- Core of approach: people with different experiences

would come up with different problems that needed solving.

What followed was an approach that created a hailstorm of sticky notes that represented people, problems and environments.

What followed was an approach that created a hailstorm of sticky notes that represented people,

problems and environments.

Three-Day LSM Ideation Process at TLC:

- Limited to iPhone and iPad apps- Asked each employee about their current favorite

app; what made them love the app so much?- Broke down elements of each app into elements –

people, actions, environments, themes.- Components were then reordered using affinity

diagrams, archetype extraction, and empathy maps.

- Took our archetypes and created new products to solve the problems we imagined they had.

Using this pitch process, we came up with around 12 ideas; from these, we voted on the most promising and decided on

12 to take to the Lean Startup Machine event.

So, at 6:00 in the morning, 40 TLC employees piled on a bus headed to DC for their first experience with LSM.

Along the way, they built landing pages, surveys, social media handles and other tools to prepare them for the day.

Once we were there, Trevor Owens – who cofounded LSM – talked to our

team for just a few minutes. The next thing we knew…

It was time to walk-the-walk and get out of the building (GOOB). This is what LSM is all about. Go out into the world,

talk to real people, find out what they think of your idea.

At the end of the action-packed day, many people seemed exhausted – they were totally wiped out.

Day Two

Teams spent the morning looking for more validation – then narrowed their focus or pivoted as a result.

By afternoon, everyone was preparing their pitch presentations.

During the pitch, each team would have five minutes to make the case for their idea.

In the end, the winning teams were an app that helped gardeners visualize their plans and a piece of hardware –

basically a hackable Sonos box.

We talked about…- Value of street validation vs. validation online- Emotions that came with ‘getting out of the building’- Parts of the validation process some people liked,

and some didn’t like

At the end of Day Two, we held an intense meeting called the ‘Just In Time’ retrospective.

So… What Happened Next?

We went back to work… but things were different.

- Language of LSM now permeates our day-to-day

- Lean concepts we’d been trying to integrate suddenly gained better traction

- LSM seems to serve as a “gateway drug” to deeper, more advanced lean concepts- Why? Lean Startup “makes failure legit” – gives

people license to make mistakes, and teaches them to fail well.

But by far the most tangible result of LSM is the formation of TLC Labs.

What the Labs aren’t:- A skunk-works style lab, closed off to most of the

employees

What the Labs are:- A way to teach about Lean Management and

Enterprise Startup principles.- A place where employees can work collaboratively

on experimental ideas - A sort of neverending Lean Startup experience

We have two Lean Startup projects running in our lab right now:

The first, eBiblioFile, is a service that delivers digital bibliographic records to libraries when they place orders with ebook vendors.- Saw a place for entry in a wide-open market –

instead of taking months to bring product to consumers, identified “Earlyvangelist” clients to create a solution within days

- Started booking revenue in under a month- Following Steve Blanks’ principle of not adding more

features until we can’t get any more customers as-is.

Here’s what eBiblioFile looks like…

The second project is called Boundless. It helps libraries make better use of Social Media to build relationships with their communities.

But by far, the most concrete component of TLC labs is this “endless LSM.” That means…- Pitch meetings every two weeks, with everyone invited- Anyone can pitch any idea they want – regardless of

industry, platform or market- Pitches are met with votes- If an idea is voted through, employees get a development

team and can “quit” their day job for two weeks to form an MVP.

Here’s a kanban board showing where all of the current ideas are moving

through the process.

We are using Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas, Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas, and

LSM’s Validation Canvas to help us figure out our hypotheses and track our progress.

See example of each on the next three slides…

Source: http://www.ashmaurya.com/2012/02/why-lean-canvas/

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know.

We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know.

- Donald Rumsfeld

Agile + Lean + Lean Startup?

After years of teaching people that quality is more important than speed, we are entering a domain where speed is the critical factor.- There is an inherent tension here

However, the Lean world is changing – trending towards exploring the “why” of their work.

Goal: To find the middle ground between the two work processes, and benefit from them both.

Was LSM a success for TLC?

- Without a question, I would do it again in a heartbeat – and most people at TLC would likely answer the same.

- LSM had a profound and immediate effect on the business at TLC

- A “safe to fail” experience mixed with real-world risk

- An experience that boosted morale, bringing members of the team together.

Startups operate under a condition of extreme uncertainty

- Eric Ries

Don’t we all- Simon Marcus

Simon Marcus@lycaonmarcus

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