Lean Product Development Workshop

Lean Product Development Workshop

What Is It?

Learning through play ?

The benefits are well recognised. It naturally and positively influences development - through exploration, thinking, problem-solving and language expression.

Play paves the way for learning. Why stop when you’re “grown up”?

Let me ask you this question: How can you plan when creating new products or services under conditions of extreme uncertainty?

If you’re working on innovation projects or entering new markets, you need the Lean Canvas and leading metrics.

Build-Measure-Learn. Repeat!

Intrapreneurial principles, tools and techniques are easy to learn and straight-forward to use. But it does take practice to master them.

Think about when you were taking driving lessons. Initially it feels like there’s too much to remember, too many controls to master, and the car is going too fast… when in fact you’re barely moving!

Learning lean product development techniques in secure planned conditions encourages more risk taking. You gain self-confidence to engage in new experiences and environments, which in-turn fosters creativity and imagination. You can quickly and safely learn how to do new things, practice new skills, and have fun too ?

Play is not wasted time, but time spent building new knowledge.

Learn through play

Discover how to lead innovation projects using lean intrapreneurial management tools and techniques

How It Works

The game is designed for up to 12 players in four teams. Each team's objective is to successfully launch their product to market and be the first to reach the Scaling phase (sometimes called Early Majority phase).

Each team makes strategic decisions around which experiments to run and how to develop their concept by:

• Building Product Features,
• Testing the Market,
• Selling; or 
• Investing in their team's skills and development.

The actions of other teams and unexpected outcomes causes players to re-evaluate their decisions and strategies throughout the game.

What You Get

Each workshop includes these core elements

• An introduction to lean product development principles such as customer discovery, problem-solution fit, product-market fit, customer validation, experimentation, leading metrics and the build-measure-learn cycle.
• Facilitated learning through a Playing Lean game session
• A wrap-up session where participants get to reflect on what they learned by playing the game

In a World of Global Competition, Ability to Consistently Turn Ideas into Products is a Unique Advantage

Hi, I’m Mark Bower, the co-founder of Intrapreneur Nation and co-creator of many of the tools you’ll find here. I’ve spent most of my career flipping between startups and large, established companies. I founded Intrapreneur Nation because I was frustrated that those big companies – who often aspired to be creative, innovative and entrepreneurial – frequently had no strategies, no processes and no tools with which to steer new ideas from concept to launch.

Instead, new ideas were driven through the existing project management process…

A project manager would be assigned to help write the plan and business case justification: capital costs, operational costs, resourcing, Gantt charts, ROI projections, risks and more. 

But the thing is – for innovation projects – these kinds of business plans just don’t work.

Nobody knows with any degree of certainty how the project will play out. Which means that the original plan is often far too optimistic, and contains far too many unknowns to be used as a real forecast. The business case is nothing more than a fantasy plan. An illusion, crafted with the sole purpose of getting through the review gate.

But managers and executives, lacking any other system to use need something to measure progress against. And so, without an alternative, they cling onto the business case document and the project plan. Even if they know it’s guesswork.

The Anti-business Business

No-one intended for businesses to operate in this way – to deliberately put obstacles in the way of effectively serving their customers.

Conventional management theory, rooted in the 1950s, defined organizational structure and best-practice processes within the constraints of the technology of the day: Rigid hierarchies. Top-down management. Incremental improvements. Low defect, Six-sigma process improvement and so on. For over 60 years those principles have served businesses well. And they continue to do so... Because modern companies must certainly be able to deliver their products and services with great quality and reliability.

But nowadays, thanks to instant global communications, international supply chains and low-cost IT services, the barrier to entry for new competitors has never been lower. Customers have almost unlimited choice, and are firmly in control.

To compete effectively with dozens or even hundreds of new market entrants, a modern company must also have the ability to rapidly discover what new products to produce. They need a new, complementary set of entrepreneurial management tools designed for dealing with innovation projects. Projects that intrinsically come laden with extreme uncertainty.

In other words: Businesses need a new innovation management toolkit with which they can take systematically take .

The Road Forward

Overcoming all these obstacles and introducing new innovation and intrapreneurial management tools is not easy.

It took my co-founder and I 10 years of trial and (oh, so painful) error to learn and master these new management skills.

But, there is good news: We’ve seen our students and mentees make the kind of progress that took us years, in just weeks or months. We've seen first-hand how with the right support, people can leapfrog the problems and failures that holds others back for years.

That’s how I know that with the right strategies, tools and mindset, you and your team can do the same too.