Lean Startups in Established Companies: How to Make it Really Happen and How to Avoid Common Pitfalls

Sustaining innovation in a company delivering services based on software is difficult. One common challenge is developing new products and services when well-defined requirements are lacking due to a high level of uncertainty of what the customer really wants. This tutorial presents one approaches to handling this uncertainty by relying on continuous experimentation and validated learning. The method “Lean Startup” is about cross-functional teams given the authority to set directions for the new product, and continuously testing out the assumptions and ideas on real customers. However, the Lean Startup team is seldom able to solve all tasks by themselves. While doing continuous experimentation, the team must align many decisions regarding with the rest of the company, which usually slows them down. Further, the team's autonomy is reduced due to multiple dependencies, which in turn reduces the innovation potential of the team. The question is how do we have Lean Startup teams which overcome these difficulties and reap the benefits using the method. Also: Who should be part of the cross-functional Lean Startup team? Should the team be isolated? What are the consequences if the team operating independently form the rest of the organization?