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LEANSTARTUPeMag Issue 6 - November 2013
by
Minimum Viable
Products for
Enterprises
Enterprise software startups use a
minimum viable product (MVP) to
learn about customers with limited
effort and money.
PAGE 8
Building Scalable
Products that
Customers Love
Per Jonsson discusses Lean
Startup in the context of real
world examples, and helpful tools
for startups.
PAGE 10
Interview with
Brian Murray
from Yammer
about Lean Startupand using Minimum
Viable Products
PAGE 12
SellBefore
YouBuildTDD was a revolutionary idea in the late 90s.
Entrepreneurs practice a similar approach,
they try to sell their product/service even
before they build it. Naresh Jain explains his
approach of nding effective MVPs.
Page 3
FACILITATING THE SPREAD OF KNOWLEDGE AND INNOVATION IN ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
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Sell Before You Build Page 3TDD was a revolutionary idea in the late 90s. Entrepreneurs practice a
similar approach, they try to sell their product/service even before they
build it. Naresh Jain explains his approach of nding effective MVPs.
Minimum ViableProducts for Enterprises Page 8Enterprise software startups use a minimum viable product (MVP) to learn
about customers with limited effort and money. How can organizations
deploy lean startup principles to develop a viable product for their
stakeholders?
Building Scalable Productsthat Customers Love Page 10Per Jonsson discusses Lean Startup in the context of real world examples,
and helpful tools for startups - Feedback Loop, Customer Development
and the Lean Canvas.
Interview with Brian Murrayfrom Yammer about Lean Startupand using Minimum Viable Products Page 12Brian Murray explains how Yammer uses Minimum Viable Products to test
their business customer hypotheses, and why they focus so much attention on
the architecture of their products.
Managing Experimentation in aContinuously Deployed Environment Page 16Wil Stuckey explains how Etsy manages to deploy nearly ~10,000 changes in
one year, and how they run A/B experiments in the midst of continual code
change.
Communicate Business Valueto Your Stakeholders Page 18Learn why and how to communicate benets rather than
featuresand what it will mean for you, your team and your organization.
Contents
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Lean Startup / Issue 6 - November 2013
Over the last four years of building my own startupsand involvement with various other startups, the mostimportant lesson Ive learned is Sell your product/ideabefore you build it. Seriously!
During this journey, Ive met many successful foundersand their most important advice has always been Doyou have paying customers? If not, rst get them andthen think of building a product that addresses theirreal needs. It sounds to me, having been a test-driven
development veteran, like Do you have failing testsbefore you write/modify any code?
At Kickstarter, an impressive 44% of projects have mettheir funding goals before theyve started building aproduct. Applying this validation-driven approach tonew product/service development certainly soundsfascinating and desirable. I would love to momentarilypause time while people line up on my doorstepwaiting to pay me hard cash for a product that doesnteven exist. Its worth a shot, right?
At Edventure Labs, when we started validating ouridea of teaching ve-year-old kids scientically provenmental arithmetic skills, which lets them calculatefaster than a calculator, we realized our potentialcustomers (parents of ve-year-olds) only vaguelyunderstood the problem we were trying to solve. Tothem, it was about number crunching, which is anobsolete skill replaced by electronic gadgets. To makematters worse, they believed kids had to be borna genius to calculate faster than a calculator. Theydid not know if their kids were capable of or eveninterested in acquiring this skill. We simply could notget any real feedback from talking to parents. If wetried to sell them our product (an educational gameto teach mental arithmetic), they would immediately
change the topic as if wed uttered some taboo.
We had to gure out how to have a meaningfulconversation with our potential customers. We couldhire a world-class team, build the product, hire somekids to go through our educational program, and thenshow real data to the parents to prove the importance/feasibility of our product. However, existing teachingmethods take a minimum of 10 minutes of practiceevery day for 18 months to teach a kid this skill. A
good 70% of the kids drop out of these programs.Moreover, we had no clue what the product will be.Also, we had to zero in on the technology, the teachingand evaluation techniques, etc. This would easily takeanother six months. So we were looking at a minimum24-month horizon, assuming we knew exactly whatneeded to be done, before we could actually havethis conversation with parents and acquire payingcustomers.
If I were a typical agile product owner, I would say, Its
a very high-risk project. Its best to skip it. Howeveras startup founders, we were convinced that thiscould change the world and hence the risk was totallyworth it. In fact, we told ourselves that because itsso hard, no one else had yet solved this problem orbuilt a successful product. So lets go full swing, hire ateam, do a collaborative product-discovery workshopwith them, come up with a release roadmap, and startsprinting. That was absolutely the best and fastest wayto burn all our funds and destroy our dreams.
Instead, we ran a series of experiments to answer openquestions and through this process completely renedour strategy and our product. Over the last two years,our vision has remained the same, but weve done ninesignicant pivots and nally we feel weve nailed it.
Sell Before You BuildBy Naresh Jain
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Lean Startup / Issue 6 - November 2013
First, we had to gure out an effective teachingtechnique for ve-year-olds. We wanted real data asa baseline to validate the retention power of differentteaching techniques. We picked the introductionto abacus (one of the tools we use to teach mentalarithmetic) lesson. Quickly, we put together a storyline,wrote a script, hired a professional animator, got a
person in the US for the voiceover, and produced a33-second animation that introduced the abacus.
We got a bunch of kids to watch this animation
and afterwards asked each to represent different
numbers on the abacus. Fewer than 50% of the kids
were able to do this. We quickly realized that kids
have so short an attention span that they quickly zone
out unless they are able to interact with what they see
on the screen. Animations are expensive to create andrequire a lengthy turnaround even for small changes.
It was clearly a bad strategy.
Inspired by mobile games, we came up with a
hypothesis that if we created inline instructions and
used micro-simulations, the kids would have a better
retention and be able to learn better. To quickly test
this hypothesis, we found a bunch of images on the
Internet within 10 minutes, created a presentation,
and added transitions to create an animation effect.Then we exported this presentation as a movie.
The kids could watch this 10-second movie and follow
a simulation/inline instruction in our game. Once the
simulation showed how to represent a number, we
would ask the kid to copy that the abacus. Of course,
the kids could not move the on-screen beads but we
would be able to test whether the kids tried to move
the right ones and assert if they remembered how
to represent the number. Ninety percent of the kidscould. If they could, we would ask them to represent
other numbers not shown in the simulation to see if
they could extrapolate what they just learned and
apply the logic to other numbers. Most kids could do
simple numbers, but were not able to do numbers
that involved the upper bead. This was another good
lesson from this experiment.
Another major question we had to gure out was
our distribution strategy. Would we be able to sell
our educational game as an app in the app stores? To
test this, we quickly created two small abacus games,
Abacus Rush and Abacus Ignite. Rush was free and
Ignite was paid. We wanted to see how paid apps
performed compare to free apps in our segment. Howmany free app users would pay for the paid app? We
gured 10% conversion would be great. We quickly
learned that paid apps would not help us sustain
our product development. Free apps did fairly well.
Could we use free apps as a marketing tool to nd
distributors/partners? We launched Abacus Rush in
Google Play as a free app called World of Numbers.
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Lean Startup / Issue 6 - November 2013
To our surprise, we crossed 120K downloads in
a weeks time. All wed done was hack something
together to test our hypothesis. We had allowed any
Android device to download the app and we quickly
realized the app had performance and usability issues
on lower versions of Android. We had to pull it off
the app store to avoid damage to our reputation.We then invested a week to x those issues and
launched another game called Number World.
Despite not allowing outdated versions of Android
to download the app, we got 93K downloads in four
days. These quick experiments helped us get the kind
of partnership offers we were looking for. Its a classic
example of how cheap, safe-fail experiments helped
us to validate our hypothesis and make progress in
our product strategy.
Previously, potential partners would commonly look
at our concepts and tell us, This is too futuristic. This
will not work! The 120K downloads certainly helped
us change their mindset.
I can go on with many other experiments we ran to
validate our hypothesis and gure out our product
strategy, but let me step back and quickly recap whatwe learned and explore how you can use some of
these techniques.
As startup founders, we might have a knack of
identifying real opportunities or pain points,
but building a sustainable business around it is
a whole different ball game. It requires a ton of
experimentation to gure out how to package and
pitch your product to really appeal to your target
customers. For many years, startups primarilyfocused on building their dream products. They
probably spent time creating a business model, but
mostly ignored customer development (acquisition
and retention). Figuring out a sustainable business
model is exponentially harder than building the
product itself, yet founders and product owners dont
pay as much attention to customer development as to
the product.
What startups really need is a scientic frameworkfor conducting many safe-fail experiments. In lean-
startup lingo, lets say you have an idea or a vision for
a product or a service. You devise a series of possible
strategies you could use to full your vision. It is
important to acknowledge that each strategy is based
on a list of hypotheses that need to be validated using
a series of cheap, safe-fail experiments (via MVPs) to
obtain validated learning. Then, based on real data,
we pivot or persist the direction of the vision. Either
way, you need to constantly keep running a series ofexperiments with fast feedback cycles to calibrate/
validate your progress/direction.
MVP is a safe-fail experiment. The best MVPs are
those that give you maximum validated learning for
minimum investment (time, effort, and opportunity
cost). In other words, life is too short to be wasted
building products that no one wants.
This is the lean-startup movement in a nutshell.
Business Facing
Technology/Implementation Facing
Are we building the right product?
Are we building the product right?
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Lean Startup / Issue 6 - November 2013
Agile methods are really good at addressing the
second question. To some extent, they also help you
answer the rst question; however, there is certainly
a delay in getting that feedback. Typically you get that
feedback at the end of your rst iteration/sprint and
in some cases only during your rst release.
Getting this feedback in a few weeks or at most three
months is certainly better than getting feedback a
couple of years later like in traditional methods. But
startups, which operate under high conditions of
uncertainty, might not be able to afford this delay.
More importantly, the lack of focus on cheaply and
safely validating whether we are building the right
product and, if not, then pivoting is essential. And
agile methods dont really focus on solving this
problem. In general, building something quick anddirty for experimentation with real customers is
something many agile folks look down upon.
If you think about it, agile methods ourish when
your users are locked in. Agile methods give you
opportunities to build a healthy relationship with
your (known) customers. Via ongoing collaboration,
communication, and feedback with them, the team
gains a better understanding of their needs or pain
points. But when your users are not captive, theydont really know or recognize their pain points,
especially in end-consumer facing products, and
relying completely on your product owner and using
agile methods seems like a bit of shooting in the dark.
Its a gamble!
I remember sitting at a bar in downtown Chicago in
2007 and discussing this issue with Jeff Patton. Jeff
drew the following diagram on a napkin:
Quadrant 1 seems like a natural habitat for agile
methods. As you travel out in the wild, however, you
might need additional techniques to succeed. This
might explain why product companies are not really
seeing the benets they expected from agile methods.
Jeff was one of the pioneers who spotted this
gap in agile methods and tried to ll it with user-
story mapping and, later, product discovery. The
collaborative nature of these product-discoverysessions and their focus on minimum marketable
product (MMP) is an important next step for many
agile teams.
The lean-startup community really pushed the
envelope on a scientic approach to running a series
of safe-fail experiments. Lean startup also focused
heavily on customer development and business-
model validation, which agile methods completely
missed. It was mostly left to the product owner tosolve these complex puzzles.
This is just the beginning of a new era of scientic
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Lean Startup / Issue 6 - November 2013
experimentation in the product-development
space. Im pretty excited to see how lean-startup
principles and thinking are already penetrating large
enterprises.
For example, with lean-startup, many enterprises are
treating each new initiative at a portfolio level justlike a startup. They are running parallel cheap, safe-
fail experiments on multiple initiatives and nally
choosing the most promising initiative instead of
picking one initiative right at the beginning based on
personal preference or gut feeling.
Last time I visited a large energy company, I heard
one developer ask the product owner in the planning
meeting what was the hypothesis behind a new
proposed feature. This was a powerful question.Immediately, the focus shifted from Lets build as
many features as possible and see which one sticks,
to What is the bare minimum we need to build to
obtain validated learning before we decide which
feature to invest in. This is brilliant because it will
really help teams to build crisp enterprise software
instead of these bloated monsters that are a real pain
in the neck for everyone to deal with.
Continuous deployment is another practice thatenterprises are trying to embrace. It makes absolute
sense for enterprises to be able to quickly validate
their new feature direction without having to build
the whole damn thing only to realize only 3% of their
users use that feature. It feels like a nice progression
from CI and other agile practices that organizations
are already practicing. Continuous deployment also
helps enterprises to use techniques like A/B testing
and stub features, which let the product owner make
concrete prioritizations based on real data.
The good news is that lean startup has something to
offer to everyone, whether you are a startup trying
to bootstrap yourself or a large enterprise building
mission-critical applications.
About the AuthorNaresh Jain - Tech-startup founder and agile/
lean evangelist
Naresh Jain is an internationally recognized
technology and process expert. As an independent
consultant, Naresh worked with many Fortune
500 software organizations and startups to deliver
mission-critical enterprise applications. Currently,
Naresh is leading two tech startups, which build
tablet-based adaptive educational games for kids,
conference management software, and a social-media
search tool. His startups are trying to gure out thesecret sauce for blending gamication and social
learning using the latest gadgets. In 2004, Naresh
founded the Agile Software Community of India, a
registered non-prot society to evangelize agile, lean,
and other lightweight methods in India.
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Lean Startup / Issue 6 - November 2013
The purpose of a minimum viable product (MVP),
as dened by Eric Ries in lean startup, is to expend
limited effort and money to learn about customers
. In the blog post The Problem with a Lean Startup:
the Minimum Viable Product, online marketer
Paul Kortman shares his experiences developing a
minimum viable product. He starts by explaining what
lean startup is:
The basics of the lean startup philosophy are to get user
feedback, do user testing, and discover if people are
willing to use (and pay for) the product you are creating
both before and throughout the creation process.
Lean startup intends to make and organization more
efcient by quickly nding out if there is a need for a
product that it wants to develop. But organizations
sometimes nd it difcult to dene a minimum viable
product:
We all understand what Product means, and
Minimum makes sense: what is the bare essentials
that you can get away with?
Paul describes the questions the team had while
trying to develop a minimum viable product:
At what point does our product become viable?
When we reach critical mass?
When we have no other features to build? (thatllnever happen, Im a visionary dont you know)
When we bring in revenue?
When we make prot?
In the Forbes article The Times Are Changin:
The Evolution of Enterprise Software, the
director of enterprise strategy at Yammer,
Brian Murray, describes what is changing in the
development of enterprise software with lean startup,
and why these changes are necessary:
A rampant inefciency in traditional enterprise
technology development is the attempt to build the
perfect product before its released to customers....
Development teams are now focusing on building
MVPs whenever possible.... This allows service
providers to efciently test their hypotheses
and ultimately create a product that slowly and
continuously evolves into what it should be, not what
people think it should be.
In the blog post Minimum Viable Product vs
Minimum Delightful Product, Adam Berrey gives his
view on how a enterprise minimum viable productlooks:
...An enterprise business system will usually win on
underlying technological innovation, features, and
sales/marketing. If you can get just enough features to
start selling, then you have something viable. Youre
off and running.
Jesus Rodriguez explains in his blog post The
Enterprise Minimum Viable Product: Focus onViable Instead of Minimum how enterprise software
development is different from consumer product
development when it comes to minimum viable
Minimum Viable Productsfor EnterprisesBy Ben Linders
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Lean Startup / Issue 6 - November 2013
products. In the consumer market, the user of the
software is also the buyer. This is rarely the case in the
enterprise world, which challenges getting product
feedback:
...The people trying the MVP are rarely the ones
making the ultimate purchase decision.... Enterprisesoftware startups need to be able to carefully
evaluate the feedback received from an MVP, ltering
the noise from the features that will make the product
more relevant to potential customers.
Another challenge for the concept of minimum viable
products for enterprise software is how organizations
base buying decisions on functionality. Jesus
Rodriguez calls this overfeature culture:
For decades, enterprise software has evolved in the
middle of a culture that value the number of features
over the simplicity and usefulness of a product.
By presenting an MVP version of your product to
enterprises, you might run onto a wall of prejudices
that tend to associate the number of features in a
product with its robustness and enterprise readiness.
Sam Palanis blog post Lessons from Agile The
Minimum Viable Product describes why they used
the minimum viable product for a complex enterpriseinitiative:
Yes, we were bringing in tons of data and writing really
complex ETLs and interfaces to extract and manipulate
the data, but the actual business functionality was
getting released in future releases and further planned
out sprints. In an ideal world we still would have been
able to succeed with our current planned approach,
however in the real world we could sense the risk of
our stakeholders patience running out.
He explains how he sees a minimum viable product,
and how you can use that to develop and deliver a
minimum desirable product:
A minimum desirable product goes beyond
viability to include more scope and features from
the requirement or scope document. Ideally you
should plan a agile release or sprints with a MVP
progressively moving to the MDP state in the nextiterations that would deliver maximum business
benet and customer delight.
Sam describes a ve-step process to identify and
dene an enterprise minimum viable product.
The steps are identifying stakeholders, scoping,
dependency between features, prototyping, and
aligning the minimum viable product with the
business needs. Step three is about the product
features:
Limit the number of interdependent features that you
include in your MVP. Focus on the viable, but keep the
minimum in mind. Having too many interdependent
feature will limit your ability to do so.
About the author
Ben Linders is a senior consultant in quality, agile,
lean, and process improvement, based in the
Netherlands. As an advisor, coach, and trainer, he
helps organizations by deploying effective software
development and management practices. He
focuses on continuous improvement, collaboration
and communication, and professional development
to deliver business value to customers. Ben is an
active member of several networks on agile, lean,
and quality, and is a frequent speaker and writer. He
shares his experience in a bilingual blog (Dutch and
English) at www.benlinders.com and on his twitterpage @BenLinders.
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Lean Startup / Issue 6 - November 2013
Building Scalable Productsthat Customers LoveBy Per Jonsson
At the GOTO Copenhagen 2012 conference, Per
Jonsson discussed lean startup in the context of
real-world examples and helpful tools for startups:
feedback loop; customer development; and the lean
canvas.
Per started his presentation with his teams startup
concept in the application hosting space. It was a
learning experience. The problem, Per explained, wasthat they were young, passionate, and full of energy.
They had one of Swedens best programmers, and
they were two business engineers thinking theyre the
best in the world. They had passion but were running
in circles. And that was painful for them because they
wanted to get somewhere. Why didnt it work?
And then they met Emil Eifrem, the CEO and founder
of Neo4j. Emil told them that they needed to focus
and told them about minimum viable product. Buthe also made clear they were running a web startup,
where nine out of ten fail. Why do they fail in the rst
place? Is it technology? No its not. They self-destruct,
Emil called it. Startups get overly ambitious. They
waste energy and resources on the wrong things.
They do too many things.
Per mentioned to the audience what they learned
they should never have done:
Dont write a business plan.A lot of people, especially
scientists or those heavily theoretical, always start
with documents. The problem with any document
is that as soon as youve written it, its by denition
obsolete because the market is always changing. So
youre sitting there with this huge document in which
youve invested a lot of time and energy but it doesnt
provide output. A quote by Steve Blank says that a
business plan is something you give to an investor so
they can put it on a shelf and never read it.
Ive talked to a few investors who said, This is whatwe do. We actually said no to many startups because
the rst thing they did was to send us a business
plan..... We did because it just felt as if they were not
out talking to the customer, as if they were in their
own mind somewhere.
Dont make assumptions.This is extremely hard
when youre a founder with, as most founders,
lots of ego. Entrepreneurs, in general, VCs, board
memberseverybody wants to have their opinionin there. People want to give advice; they feel like a
better person for doing so. A company of individuals
all wanting to say something and have an opinion is a
problem. In the end, every opinion is just taking you
further from the real truth. Everything is a guess.
Somebody with 20 years of experience can make a
very, very good guess but its still a guess. Every guess
needs to get validated. You need to go out there and
talk to people and see if your case is true. Is it still
true? It might have been true a week ago or a year ago,but is that still the case?
Per showed how the lean startup model resembles
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Lean Startup / Issue 6 - November 2013
agile development. You have iterations or you
iterate on something. The difference here is that
you integrate the customer-feedback loop into the
validation. Every time you have an iteration, you start
with an hypothesis, for example, I think if we write
this blog post, it will get us at least 100 subscribers.
And then when you have your hypothesis, you needto test it. To test it, you need to have a prototype of
some sort.
The lean startup is all about minimizing waste, said
Per. There are two types of waste that are common.
One is overproduction, doing things you dont need,
doing the wrong things, or building a product that is
too big. The other is inventory: you build something
immediately because youre going to need it later
and your team is passionate about building it. But ifyou dont need it now, why build it now? It creates
complexity in the product before its necessary.
At the beginning, look for your minimum viable
product. You want to have the minimum product,
meaning with as few features as possible, but it needs
to be viable. You need to test from the beginning that
people want to pay for your product. If you have a
minimal product but people dont want it, you have a
problem. There has to be a willingness to pay.
The discovery phase is all about the problem and
the solution. When you have that, you can look at
the market and ask, Okay, how can I create a sales
process for this product that I can repeat over and
over in the same market and succeed? Is this market
big enough for that? How can I not go out to every
customer and sell? How can I make it scale?
Per explained that this is where you often have to goback and say, No, we were wrong here. The market
were looking at is too small and its not growing. So
were not going to choose that market. We have to go
back. That is what it called a pivot. A pivot can be that
the market is too small. It can be that your hypothesis
was actually wrong. It can be that you need to focus
on a subset of the existing product or even a new
product. In the end, its about the fact that you cant
go on because if you go on the next step, it gets really
expensive. If you go here without knowing thesethings and start the company, you burn a lot of money
and thats when VCs get really angry with you.
The center of the validation process is nding your
business model, said Per. Osterwalder and the
business-model canvas are quite popular. The lean
canvas is an adaption of the business-model canvas
for the lean startup. Its focusing more on early-stage
companies, basically. And in the beginning, you want
to focus on problem solution because thats yourdiscovery phase then.
Per ended his talk with some suggested readings
about lean startup:
The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Lean Entrepreneur by Brant Cooper and Patrick
Vlaskovits
About the speaker:
Per Jonsson is a Swedish entrepreneur and engineer
passionate about creating technology that simplies
lives. Per is at a focal point for global impact as
the Stockholm ambassador for Sandbox Network
and as the CEO and co-founder of Omnicloud, a
next-generation Platform-as-a-Service. Through
Omnicloud, he is also an active contributor to the
open-source PHP framework Melt.
Presentation Summary by Ben Linders.
WATCH THE FULL PRESENTATION ONLINE ON INFOQ
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Lean Startup / Issue 6 - November 2013
Interview with Brian Murrayfrom Yammer about Lean Startupand Minimum Viable ProductsBy Ben Linders
Enterprises are nding ways to adopt the lean
startup approach to support the businesses and
customers to whom they deliver their products. They
want early and frequent customer feedback to be able
to understand their needs and deliver products that
create value for them.
The news item Minimum Viable Products for
Enterprises gives some examples of how enterprises
can use lean startup with limited effort and money
to learn about customers. One of the companies
mentioned was Yammer, and InfoQ talked with Brian
Murray, Yammers director of enterprise strategy,
about how the company uses minimum viable
products to test their business-customer hypotheses,
and why they focus so much attention on the
architecture of their products.
InfoQ: Brian, can you briey introduceyourself to the InfoQ readers?
Brian: Ive been with Yammer for about three
years now, and before Yammer I was a technology
consultant rolling out big technology like SAP and
Siebel in large enterprises. I made the shift over to
Yammer, and Ive had a really incredible experience
learning about software as a service, cloud, and new
ways of introducing technology. I spend about half
my time at Yammer on the customer-engagement
side, helping companies make sense of this new way
of communicating, and the other half on the product
team helping shape the direction of our product and
evangelize and explain this new way of creating our
product and iterating on it rapidly.
InfoQ: Would you describe your role
as also a product manager?
Brian: Yes. Our product team is split into two
categories. We have the design category and
those are all our user researchers, user-experience
designers, and the pure creative designers, so they are
the ones creating the look and feel of Yammer.
The other category is pure product management,which includes all the product managers who are
responsible for bringing new features to market
and working with engineers, our analytics team,
the design team. And there is my team that is sort
of a liaison between the market, our customers, our
internal teams like sales and customer engagement,
and the technical teams like engineering and
analytics. Our job is to make sure that what we are
building is going to be well-received by the market
and our customers, and that we are anticipating andmitigating any potential obstacles.
InfoQ: How big is Yammer right now?
Brian: Yammer has about 450 employees now,
globally.
InfoQ: In an article last year in Forbes (mentioned
in the InfoQ news item Minimum Viable
Products for Enterprises), you mention that a
new approach is needed to develop and releaseproducts quicker. What makes this so important?
Brian: This new approach that we call rapid iteration
- there are a lot of different terms for it - should be
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adopted by all technology vendors for a number of
reasons. The primary reason is that its available now.
Historically speaking, when the Internet was not as
powerful, when applications were purely on-premise
models, it just wasnt possible to have a software-as-
a-service model. However, with the introduction of
cloud architecture, we can make changes quickly toour products and ultimately avoid making too many
assumptions, and thats key here. In a traditional
enterprise-development model, you would have two-
or-three-year release cycles and you would have to
make a lot of assumptions as to what your users were
going to expect from your technology by the time it
was released to market.
With Yammer we make small assumptions. We have
hypotheses and we are able to test them quicklyover weeks instead of months or years, and that way
we can steer our ship and make sure that Yammer is
directionally meeting the needs of our customers and
that we are not working on something or delivering
a feature that is ultimately not going to achieve the
value that we are trying to create.
InfoQ: Yammer is applying the lean-startup
approach. Why did you choose this, and howdid you implement it at Yammer?
Brian: We chose it because it was available. If you
look at the pedigree of our founding team, with David
Sacks and Adam Pisoni, they had a lot of experience
in technology, but in consumer-focused technology,
not necessarily enterprise-focused technology. And
so, they were well-versed in the cloud model, with
lean-startup approaches, with multitenancy, and they
believed wholeheartedly that these architectures
where inherently better, more efcient, and allowedthe company to scale faster. We use the same technical
architectures and development methodologies in this
enterprise context - which has had some interesting
implications - but overall, it really, in our opinion, was
what made Yammer, Yammer. Its what allowed us to
compete when we were just starting up and its what
allowed us to offer unique perspective and experience
that Microsoft is getting a lot of value from. You may
often hear our founders saying that architecture is
destiny; we really do believe that in the long term,
the way your technology is architected dictates your
sustainability and long-term viability.
InfoQ: Minimal viable products (MVP) are
used to deliver light versions of new features
of Yammer. Can you give some examples of
how this has been used?
Brian: We almost always try to employ an MVP model
in our feature set. This isnt to say that we release half-
baked features, but that we have hypotheses as to whatour users are expecting, what they are looking for in our
products, either through customer feedback or looking
at overall engagement data. We may have a grand vision
for what our customers are looking for, but rather than
trying to build an entire feature set that encompasses
that vision, which would take a lot of time, we break it up
into smaller chunks.
An interesting example of this is a new feature that
is called Universal Publisher. Universal Publisher
represents a really signicant change in Yammer. (It lets
you) post a single message to multiple groups at the
same time. Today, you can only post a single Yammer
message to a single group and our back-end systems are
architected to support that use case. With Universal
Publisher, we want to enable multi-group posting and
multi-audience posting, but what that means is making
signicant changes to our messaging architecture.
Rather than building our complete vision for this
feature, we are breaking it up into small pieces: small
improvements to the UI, gradual message architecturerenements, etc. By breaking up our vision into smaller,
more manageable chunks, we are able to make fewer
assumptions and learn whats resonating with our users
along the way.
InfoQ: I can imagine if you look at public and
private groups, youre going to be balancing
between privacy on one hand and ease of use
on the other hand?
Brian: Yes, and also how do you visually indicate
that a message is part of a private group and a public
group, or how do you make it clear to the end user
that when they are posting something its either
private or public? We have some ideas about what
might work but we cant say with certainty that one
implementation of that idea is better than another, so
thats where we will use our MVP model and rapidly
iterate on the idea until we get it right.
InfoQ: Do lean-startup practices and an MVP
approach to product development differ in
the enterprise context? If so, how?
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Lean Startup / Issue 6 - November 2013
Brian: Again, my past experience before joining
Yammer was rolling out traditional enterprise
technologies, large ERP systems, CRM systems,
and these projects would take a year if not more.
Part of that was the change management in the
communication and the training involved in rolling
out the new technology to make sure it was adopted.
You have a specic and predictable go live date intraditional enterprise-technology deployments which
the deployment team orients themselves around.
In a SaaS environment, where you can continuously
improve your product, the change is smoothed out
over time. There is a major implication of this shift
in technology deployments in the enterprise. The
products we use in our daily lives like Facebook,
Twitter and Zynga are changing twice a day now - but
no one notices! Thats because the change is less
charging and more gradual.
Consumers also have a one-to-one relationship with
the vendor creating the technology. With Yammer, we
are selling to businesses, so we create relationships
with the business and the teams running their
Yammer network and they are representative of all
the Yammer users in their network. When we make
changes to the product, especially ones that are going
to be noticeable or may alter the user experience, we
need to make sure we are providing enough advancedcommunication so that our champions and our
administrative teams on the customer side are fully
aware of the change and implications. We also want
to conrm they have all the training materials that
weve created at their disposal so that they can ensure
that this new feature is adopted effectively. This is not
to say that these practices should not be employed;
they absolutely should, but in an enterprise context
you need to take a little more caution rolling out new
changes because a lot of businesses are depending onthese tools for their day-to-day operations and you
need to make sure you are not being too disruptive.
InfoQ: I understand that its not just about
the feature but also about additional
communication and any means that are
needed to implement the new features in the
organization. These are part of your product
and supplied to your customer, right?
Brian: Absolutely. One of the differences from the
traditional model is that with one-to-three-year
release cycles, once you get the new version of the
software, it is a drastically new application. There
are a lot of changes that have been bundled up into
this new version. On the other hand, with the rapid-
iteration approach, you can actually smooth out the
changes over time, rather than having a completely
new experience at the time of upgrading your
software. This enables a more natural transition intoan improved experience over time. Its about breaking
down big ideas into smaller, more consumable chunks
and introducing those in a way thats not disruptive.
Ultimately, we are ensuring that the features that hit
the market are valuable and are lifting core metrics
like engagement, technology adoption, and message
posting. With traditional software development, you
had to make a lot of guesses as to what will work and
theres no good way of validating those guesses once
the new technology has been released.
InfoQ: Testing your hypotheses and increasing
customer understanding are often why
companies use MVPs. Are there other benets
from using the lean-startup approach?
Brian: There have been a lot of interesting lessons
that have come from the way we organize the product
and engineering teams. Every team thats working on
a feature includes the engineers that are building the
feature, the designers who are designing the UI of
the feature, and data analysts. Our analysts evaluate
the engagement data on new features and then work
with the product manager to deduce whats working
and whats not working. One major benet is that
the feedback loop helps our product managers make
better and better hypotheses over time because they
see whats resonating with our customer base. They
get better at avoiding assumptions and keeping an
open mind to all possible solutions.
InfoQ: What did you learn from using lean
startup? What worked, what didnt, and why?
Brian: Our early architectural decisions were
critical to our long-term success. Yammer is actually
a compilation of a number of different services.
Search, ranking, message feeds, proles, and more
are all powered by separate services. All these
services interact with each other to power Yammer.
Rather than have a monolithic codebase, Yammers
is distributed. This allows us to improve any one of
these services independently, so we can enhance
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Lean Startup / Issue 6 - November 2013
one service without worrying too much about what
the trickle-down effect will be on everything else.
Weve learned that by decoupling the services that
power Yammer, we are able to innovate faster. In fact,
weve spent a lot of energy taking some of our larger
services, like the one powering Yammer feeds, and
breaking them down into smaller services. By doingthat, we are able to again optimize more efciently
without disturbing other services or the overall user
experience.
InfoQ: How did lean help you with
architecture? Did it make you more aware of
the criticality of architecture?
Brian: It helped us realize that there is a signicant
advantage in being able to improve these different
services individually. Lean helped us realize thatdecoupling or distributing our codebase is always a
good thing, and the more we can do that the quicker
we can move and innovate on Yammer.
InfoQ: If companies would like to use lean startup,
what you would want to recommend to them?
Brian: I would recommend spending a lot of time
thinking about your architecture (before you start
building) and get a clear picture of the customers
youll be selling to. If you are selling to the enterprise,consider the various regulatory environments, your
customers appetites for change, and how you will
create sustainable relationships with them. If you
can plan ahead for that, you will be better off in the
long term. Keep in mind that there is no end date
to a good product. You should always be iterating
because the demands of your market and your
customers will always be changing. The pace of
change is accelerating, so your product (and company)
will always need to be evolving to meet that evolvingdemand. Its important to keep that in mind and to
realize that this is all a journey. It comes down to
building a product that your end users really love and
helps them do their jobs better.
InfoQ: Did you use any lean-startup camp or
anything like that to get an understanding of
lean startup?
Brian: A lot of people have been very involved in
that movement for a long time. Everybody has readliterature on this topic. Weve just employed those
practices over time; its always been in the back of our
minds. We dont consider it an option, more of a core
principle that we all need to adhere to. Its been really
great to have a founding team thats so committed
to this philosophy and its fantastic to see more and
more enterprise software vendors adopt these ideas
as well.
InfoQ: Is there something you personally
learned from doing lean startup?Brian: What has been really interesting about this
whole process for me -- moving from traditional
enterprise technology to this cloud-based, rapid
development approach -- is that we always have to
remain intellectually honest. As a product manager,
being intellectually honest means not tying your
emotions to the particular feature youre working on. To
truly deliver the best product to your users, you have to
be open to the fact that you might be wrong and realize
that the best way to measure your features utility is
to look at the data collected through testing. Human
judgment is imperfect and, as a result, we always should
use data to help guide us towards the right decisions.
Thats been a fascinating learning for me.
InfoQ: So basically stay open for any input
you get from your customers?
Brian: Yes. Consider this: if you have engineers whose
jobs are tied to a certain feature set, they will always
want that feature set to take precedence over other
features because they have a connection and an
implicit need for that feature set to be highlighted or
improved upon. But if you separate the team from any
individual area of your product, you are able to make
more rational decisions that are not inuenced by
emotion or some other obscure motivation that is not
really in alignment with the ultimate goal of improving
the end-user experience.
About the IntervieweeBrian Murray is director of enterprise strategy at
Yammer, where he helps shape the companys product
strategy to meet enterprise demands and evangelize
SaaS, consumerizaton, and data-driven-development
trends. Brian partners with customers across
industries, geographies, and sizes to forecast changes
in the market and promote adoption of Yammer and
other SaaS-based enterprise applications.
READ THIS ARTICLE ONLINE ON InfoQhttp://www.infoq.com/articles/brian-murray-lean-startup
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Lean Startup / Issue 6 - November 2013
Managing Experimentation in aContinuously Deployed EnvironmentBy Wil Stuckey
Wil Stuckey explained at QCon New York 2013 how
Etsy manages to deploy nearly 10,000 changes in one
year and how they run A/B experiments in the midst
of continual code change.
Etsy classies their website launches into three
distinct groups: experiments; ramp-ups; and
communications. Experiments are basically A/B
tests, a way of validating a hypothesis. In a ramp-up(also called an operational ramp-up), Etsy releases
a particular feature in a percentage of people over
time to validate that it doesnt bring down the site.
Communication is a catch-all bucket for things that
arent necessarily code-related, like marketing.
The cong system at Etsy works with branching in
code and not with feature branches in the version
management, Wil explained. This helps to ne-tune
who gets to see what:
How does a typical launch cycle look in the
continuous deployment world? It starts the
same, with an idea, for instance, on how to make
the homepage better. But during the design and
development cycle, it gets different, said Wil, as there
will be multiple deploys to the website. They could be
just renements to the code that xes bugs or could
mean a conguration change that Etsy is opening up
for a new set of people.
One of the rst things Etsy does is an internal admin
launch, where the staff can see the feature. It is
used to gather feedback and to test the feature in anaudience slightly wider than the development team.
The next step is called a public prototype. That is a
group on Etsy that either invites members or is public
for anyone to join. Users are asked for feedback,
which is incorporated into the product. This goes on
until the point when its ready for an experiment.
An experiment has a hypothesis, e.g. an expected
increase of user engagement. Fifty percent of eligible
public trafc will receive the new feature and 50%
will retain the old feature. After a few weeks, there is
enough data to analyze and Etsy can decide whether
or not to launch the renement.
Wil showed that initially Etsy used a wiki and email
to communicate changes and results of experiments,
but this became overwhelming as the number of
launches increased. To solve this, Etsy made a tool
called Launch Calendar. It is a simple web app, written
in Python and hosted on App Engine. It collectsstructured metadata about launches in a central
repository where people can nd whats upcoming,
whats current, and what is past:
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Lean Startup / Issue 6 - November 2013
Etsy used Launch Calendar to send a daily emailupdate to a mailing list. but came up with an evenbetter idea, which they called Catapult. Wil presentedan example experiment and showed how Etsy usesCatapult to leverage it. In Catapult, you use web formsto set up the launch, cong the feature, and denemetrics. The GUI outputs the code block that you canthen copy and paste into your conguration le. Afterdeployment, Catapult tracks the experimental results.
Catapult brings the awareness that Etsy needs forcontinuous deployment. It brings together muchinformation into one place so that people dont haveto hunt for it elsewhere.
Wil ended his presentation with some suggestions:
If youre starting out, I would suggest starting simple.Start with what you have and use it until you outgrowit and then build the next iteration, just like we dowith stuff on the site in terms of whats our minimalviable product or how can we do this in the quickestway possible to meet the need and then evolve. Andthen build processes that enable you to ship. A keymantra of development at Etsy is just ship. Just ship.Always be shipping.
About the speaker
Wil Stuckey is software engineer at Etsy.
Presentation Summary by Ben Linders
WATCH THE FULL PRESENTATION ONLINE ON INFOQ
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/etsy-deploy
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Lean Startup / Issue 6 - November 2013
Communicate Business Valueto Your StakeholdersBy Jenni Jepsen
Ill let you in on a secret: I dont care what letter
you put in front of DD. I dont care so much about
how code is written or the ins and outs of software
development. Its not because I dont realize how
incredibly important it is, its because what I care
most about is the value delivered. How can what
you do save me time, money, and/or frustration? Im
smart enough to know that without you, the incredibly
talented member of the development team, my lifewill go into a tailspin. Nothing will work. I realize and
appreciate that what you develop creates value for me.
So why is it then that when an IT team wants to
really understand their stakeholders needs, improve
perceived results, gain greater visibility from
the organization, increase the likelihood of more
funding, or attract talented people to the project,
they sometimes feel challenged? Because they have
a tough time communicating the value they aredelivering, or getting their stakeholders to articulate
the real benets they desire.
Stakeholders in your organization need to understand
what it is you will do for them in a language that
creates meaning for them. And you need to help them
do that. But how?
Whats in it for my stakeholders?
First, let me dene stakeholders. I like ScottAmblers denition: Anyone who is a direct user,
indirect user, manager of users, senior manager,
operations staff member, the gold owner who
funds the project, support (help desk) staff member,
auditors, your program/portfolio manager, developers
working on other systems that integrate or interact
with the one under development, or maintenance
professionals potentially affected by the development
and/or deployment of a software project.
So why dont your stakeholders always understand
the value you deliver? Because often project leaders,even agile project leaders, talk about their projects
or processes in terms of features. Its not their fault,
stakeholders do the same. We need faster processes,
better user interfaces, more efcient, system-
supported workows. Yes, but what do these things
mean for the stakeholder? Whats in it for them? And
what does it mean for your organization as a whole?
You can communicate exactly whats in it for your
stakeholders by communicating in terms of benets,
not features. Features are what your system orprocess can do. Benets are why people care.
The most straight-forward denition of each (which
comes out of the marketing world) are:
Feature: a characteristic that is special or
important
Benet: an advantage that is meaningful for your
stakeholder
Frederieke Ubels, scrum process coach at Bol.com inthe Netherlands, commented to me that she thinks of
benets as more universal: Everybody wants to feel
happy and safe, make money, have happy customers,
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Lean Startup / Issue 6 - November 2013
etc. Features help to achieve benets, but only if and
when they are used not so universal, more of the
conditional kind, she says. Features can be used, but
they can also not be used. It is up to you if you value
them or not.
Sell with the benet; support
with the featureMarketers have been selling us the benets since
the beginning of time. I dont really want the wheel, I
want something that is easier to roll or even better,
something that makes transport easier so I save time
and energy. I dont want a new car, I want something
that gets me from A to B quickly so I save time, is safe,
and looks cool so that I feel good driving it.
The same goes for projects. I dont want to be able tosearch a certain way in a database. I want to get the
information I need when I need it, to save time and
frustration. I dont want to analyze customer needs. I
want to satisfy customers, so they keep buying from
us and my company makes more money.
Saving time. Feeling secure. Experiencing little or no
frustration. Earning more money. These are the real
benets. These are the things that create business
value. It is important that we know how to sell(or, as Id rather say, communicate) the benets to
stakeholders.
Its the benets that connect with our emotions that
create a desire for something. The relatively new eld
of neuromarketing explores how these connections
work. Basically, when we create a tangible connection
to something, especially something that connects to an
emotion or one that we can see, touch, hear, smell or
taste, a memory of it is embedded deep in the brain. Itis in this part of the brain that decisions are made. So,
if you can nd a way to connect on an emotional level
with your stakeholder, you are much closer to creating
understanding, having them on your side when you
are looking for more resources or support, and working
to reach your own value-adding goals.
But communicating the benets is not enough.
You also need to talk to the logical part of peoples
brains that want the facts, the data, the researchbehind things. These are your features. They are all
the capabilities that let you deliver the benet: the
business value to your stakeholder.
Start by talking about the value you deliver and
support your messages with features. As you get
better at this, you can steal from marketing experts
who tell stories that t the stakeholders world.
Create a story that clearly shows you understand
whats in their heart and mind.
For example, one such story (slightly exaggerated)
might be:
In a time only a few iterations away, our CRM clients
will be able to turn on their PCs and immediately
search and nd the customer information they need
in any form. It could be a shipping address, their
very rst purchase order, a list of most-purchased
items. They can cross-reference against other orders,
including other customers in the same company andwith outside companies, and see trends. They will
become smarter, more trusted CRM representatives,
and their customers will be ecstatic. Our CRM clients
will become rich and fullled and, in turn, so will we.
Together, we will all live happily ever after.
Question until you get to the benetWhat if you dont know the benet? Or worse, what
if your stakeholder does not know the benet? Then,
you need to ask a lot of questions. If you prefer theFive Whys, use it. If you want to question in a more
conversational style, try the following:
So what? questions to understand the beneft
(assuming your stakeholder knows what the beneft is):
Whats in it for my stakeholder?
Whats the purpose of the (feature stakeholder
wants)?
What do you (the stakeholder) want to be able to do?
What advantage does this (feature) bring?
Questions to help your stakeholder discover/
understand the real beneft (business value) (assuming
your stakeholder cannot articulate the beneft):
Why would I (stakeholder) want or need this?
What can I (stakeholder) do with it?
Why is this (feature) better than others?
Why should (the stakeholder) care about this
(feature)?
To get at the real benets (business value),
ask why each feature is included to begin with. Take
that answer and ask how does this connect with the
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Lean Startup / Issue 6 - November 2013
stakeholders desires? This will help you get to whats
in it for the stakeholder at an emotional level.
There can also be situations where you have more
than one stakeholder, and they may not necessarily
agree on what the real benet is. For instance, a
customer-service manager may say having satisedcustomers who make repeat business is the benet.
His director may say the benet is the revenue earned
and not the happy customers. In this case, you could
argue that you need happy customers in order to
make money. Question until you understand what the
main benet is. And if you need to, create a hierarchy
of benets that can then be supported with specic
features.
User-story format as a starting pointComing from the non-IT world, I know nothing, really,
about software development. But having worked
for more than 20 years in marketing and leadership
and change communications, I do know the value of
communicating in terms of benets. Start with the
benet message, I always advise my clients. You
need to get people to care about what it is you are
doing for them!
Clever minds like Chris Matts and Andy Pols, DanNorth, Liz Keogh, and others talk about behavior-
driven development and stakeholder stories (rather
than user stories) in order to understand the business
value a stakeholder is looking for. The common user-
story format is a good starting point. Teams are trying
to get to the benet.
As a (role, persona),
I want (goal, what will the feature do, why is it useful),
so that (benet/business value).
From a pure communications perspective, one would
quickly suggest turning the common user-story
format upside down (and that is what I now know
Chris Matts suggested in 2008). Heres my version:
We will (benet/business value)
for our (role, persona),
because we have (what will the feature do, why is it
useful).
Or simply skip the I want part of the common user-
story format to focus solely on the end user and the
benet. This puts the least constraints on the team,
since no features are even mentioned.
Here is a simplied example that some Siri developers
at Apple could have worked with:
As an end-user consumer,
I want to be able to make changes to my calendar and
search without having to type on my iPhone, because it
saves me time and hassle. (Its also safer if I happen to bedriving.)
A stickier way of communicating this so that the
benet comes rst is:
We will save time and hassle, and increase safety
for our end-user consumers,
because we have an intelligent personal assistant that
can make changes to calendars and search using a natural
language user interface.
Im not proposing that using the benet-rst is
necessarily the right way when it comes to software
development. What I am saying is that starting with
the benet message is the way to effectively get
to and communicate the business value.
Making the benet message stickWhen Im working with teams who are having
difculties getting their stakeholders to understand
the value of their projects, it is usually because theteam does not know how to communicate in terms
of the value they are delivering. Understanding
what the value is and then starting with the benet
message are rst steps. But how, then, do you make
the message top of mind for your stakeholder, so that
your stakeholder can also communicate the business
value of your project to others inside and outside
of the organization? You do that by increasing the
stickiness of your message.
After working as a journalist and then as an executive-
communications coach, Ive seen the effectiveness
of using simple, easy-to-understand messages that
convey signicance and motivate to action. Chip
Heath and Dan Heath in Made to Stick outline
succinctly what I have been teaching for years.
Here are their Six Elements of Stickiness to make
messages memorable:
1. Simple whats the most important thing toremember?
2. Unexpected how can we grab the stakeholders
attention?
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3. Concrete what is the context that makes the
benet relevant?
4. Credible why should stakeholders believe this?
5. Care whats in it for me the stakeholder?
6. Act what should I do now?
Incorporate these elements into your benetmessage to make a real imprint in your stakeholders
mind. Even the best messages do not have all of the
elements, but they usually have three or four.
I worked with an IT team responsible for developing a
patient-tracking system for a large group of hospitals.
They were not getting the support they needed from
their stakeholders, and they were not communicating
the value they were delivering. After getting to the
benet and thinking about the value they delivered in
a sticky way, the team came up with the following:Our system saves lives. Doctors and nurses anywhere in
the country have quick access to patient records. With
a single sign-on, they can get an immediate overview of
each patients conditions and medications. They can feel
secure in knowing they are giving their patients the best
medical care possible.
This message contains the following elements:
SIMPLE, CONCRETE, UNEXPECTED (Our system saves
lives.),CARE (They can feel secure in knowing they are giving
their patients the best medical care possible.)
ACT (With a single sign-on)
The advantage is that the benet message is powerful
and easy for the team and stakeholders to remember
and articulate. It serves as the basis for every
communication that is made about the value the team
is delivering with this system.
Enhanced communications builds trustSo what is your benet in improving your
communications about the benets of your project
with your stakeholder? The biggest benet is
building trust. In order to gure out the value for
the stakeholder, you need to have (or at least start
building) a relationship with them. This happens
through the benet-communications process. And
when you talk about the benets of your project in a
language that resonates with stakeholders, it helpsthem to trust you especially when you deliver that
value. It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle: the more
you talk about the benets (or business value) of your
project and the more you deliver those benets, the
stronger your relationships with stakeholders become
and the more value you are able to create.
Practical tools to increaseunderstandingThe next time you are working with your stakeholders
to gather requirements, start by talking about the
benet or business value. Make sure the benets are
real. Making a visual representation is an excellent
and very agile way to create a common understanding
of these benets. (Effect-mapping, other types of
mindmaps, and vision boxes can help the process.)
Heres an example of a vision box for a large company
in Denmark. It has the projects brand and logo on one
side, another has benets, and the sides you cant seelist the features.
Heres some nal advice. Increase communication
effectiveness between teams and stakeholders by:
Understanding the real benet
Supporting with features
Asking questions Creating your benet-rst user story
Proting from making your benet messages stick
Focusing on building trust through the process
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7/21/2019 EMag Lean Startup
22/22
Lean Startup / Issue 6 - November 2013
See for yourself the difference communicating
business value will make in creating better
understanding, achieving goals together, and working
in relationships of trust.
About the author
Jenni Jepsen has more than 20 years experience
helping individuals, teams, and organizations use
strategic communications to align with business
goals, create meaning for stakeholders, and build
trust through the process. This way of communicating
opens the way to better understanding, increased
collaboration, and quicker results effectively leading
teams to success. Jenni speaks, writes, and consults
on how organizations can increase their business
value enterprise-wide.
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