This is the last of an 8-post series on applying Lean Startup in the various phases of a start-up. The previous post examined the concierge phase. In this onet we’ll take a look at the tools that will accompany you in your efforts to maintain a lean startup practice in your company during the concierge phase.
Lean Startup Principles and fundamental tools
The tools suggested in this post are but the tip of the iceberg of the tools that exist to help you adhere to the principles of Lean Startup. They will vary according to the specifics of your business model. A great place to find apps to help you with your productivity is the Slack apps directory. Using thes tools doesn’t mean you are following a Lean Startup approach. You can only do this by putting into practice, on a daily basis, the various principles that underly Lean Startup.
Top Lean Startup Principles:
(Click on the theory to see an example of a book on the topic)
| Theory | Principles |
| Lean Production | Customer focus; Efficient use of resources; Just in time; small batches; |
| Customer Development | Understand your customers’ needs then develop your product/service; Use continuous feedback from your markets to make decisions (feedback loop) |
| Design Thinking | Have a 360 view of needs, problems, issues; Empathize with your customers before you start designing your product; test multiple prototypes before going to market; transparency of information and process |
| Agile development | Develop in iteration; test your developments with users before going to the next step; use agile planning tools |
There are also fundamental tools that come with the Lean Startup approach. These tools are:
- Management tools:
- Business model canvas or the Lean Canvas for planning.
- Experiment board to guide you with your first experiments.
- Kanban boards to ensure you are not creating bottlenecks in your production
- Metrics: Use data to make decisions whenever possible.
- Innovation accounting:
- Keeping a log of your experiments
- Innovation options to calculate the maximum value of your start-up and the associated level of risk.
Here are ideas of tools or types of tools to look for when applying the Lean Startup approach in the concierge phase (last phase) of your start-up.
Product development tools
If your product is an application or software
Continuous deployment (or delivery for certain markets) espouses most of the Lean Startup principles. It requires a slew of tools. Atlassian offers many of them with apps such as Bitbucket, JIRA and Bamboo.
If you’re creating a physical product
You may want to look at integrating your suppliers into your corporate Slack, if not already done. In order to do so, you should get the secure ($) version of Slack.
You’ll also want to establish processes that will ensure your marketing/product design and production teams communicate regularly in order to ensure market needs and trends are communicated asap throughout your value chain. Common work tools for these teams and spaces (physical or virtual) where they can easily meet on a daily basis should be available.
Marketing tools
You will want to look into integrating as many of your data sources as possible (Analytics, CRM, Ticketing system, social media feeds, and manual data) into a robust business intelligence platform. One of the better and more agile one out there at this time is Tableau. Qlik and Microsoft BI are also good choices. IBM’s SAS and Watson are better, since they integrate AI elements, but highly likely out of your price range.
If you’re running an on-line business then you need to start looking into an agile and powerful real-time analytics solution. Google, aside from its free version, has a module approach that is neat since you can only get the packages you use. The entire 360 suite of 7 add-ons is very costly. You’ll need to make sure you get an ROI before investing in it. There are other options such as Clicky that also offers real-time analysis. Clicky integrates with Slack.
Whatever BI or analytics platform you get, the most important part is to ensure you have the resources and processes in place to maximise their returns for your company. Hence it must be part of most everyone’s job description to feed the BI databases on a regular, if not daily, basis. You’ll also need someone to ensure the data in your system is clean and the analyses are correctly interpreted.
Your experiment logs should be scraped for pertinent market information regularly. They should have their own Slack channel (or section in your intranet).
By the end of the concierge stage, you may be cranking out multiple new products in rapid fire in order to get a larger wallet share of existing customers or to satisfy the needs of new segments. Applications such as LaunchLeap that help you get quick feedback from a large number of users will help you accelerate your experiments.
HR tools and guidelines
If you aren’t outsourcing your recruiting and training then you’ll want to look for tools to make these processes more efficient.
Get a screening tool (with broad mesh) up on your website to reduce the time spent looking at non pertinent resumes. Make sure your corporate values and culture are also reflected on your website and all your social media content.
Use your FB and LinkedIn corporate pages to get referrals for potential top candidates.
Invest in training video s available 24/7. These online videos make the on boarding process more efficient and transparent.
Encourage inter-employee training and coaching. Having video, sound and recording capabilities on their computers or laptop will enable employees to share their knowledge with their peers either in real-time or asynchronously.
Have as few employee guidelines as possible. When they are absolutely necessary, keep them as broad as possible. Nothing kills creativity and initiative as well as guidelines. Just remember not to substitute good management with guidelines and you should be fine.
Financial tools
Finance is not my area of expertise so I won’t venture into suggesting accounting apps or platforms. What you will want to look for in your accounting system to support your Lean Startup approach are the following capabilities:
Integrating market information into your sales projections (by segment)
Enabling you to show only the financial data you want to specific categories of employees.
Although you want to remain as transparent as possible with your financial results, your growing staff and eco-system will require you to limit the financial information you share with some of them. If your system doesn’t allow you the flexibility to easily share some of the information with specific employees/partners/suppliers then you may be tempted to only share summarized data on a monthly or quarterly basis.
Conclusion
As you have now come to realise throughout this series of posts there is no one way to apply the Lean Startup approach. There are however wrong ways to go about it. If whatever you are doing goes against or disregards Lean Startup principles, then it’s obviously not Lean Startup. Throwing in buzzwords like MVP and pivots won’t change this.
We also saw a variety of tools used in the practice of Lean Startup. These don’t even represent the tip of the iceberg. They will also become obsolete very soon. Newer and better ones will become available. The important message is to keep looking for tools that will make you more efficient and help you achieve the minimum in MVP. These tools will also enable you to run experiments in a timeframe that was impossible only a few years ago.
These tools are the reason an iterative, experiment-based approach like Lean Startup is now viable.
Lean Startup is the essence of entrepreneurship. It’s about doing. It’s about taking only the risks you have to take in order to answer a market need with a product or a service. It’s about having some core competences but mostly about how fast you can learn what is pertinent and apply your learnings. Finally, it’s about discipline, rigor and lots of hard work.
Lean Startup is rarely sexy but then again neither is starting and growing a successful business.
