Friday April 23rd noon-9pm at the Accelerator Centre in Waterloo we’re hosting the community for live streaming event coverage of the conference happening in San Francisco.

Check out the speaker schedule and Register for free now!

Startup Lessons Learned is the first event designed to unite those interested in what it takes to succeed in building a lean startup. The goal for this event is to give practitioners and students of the lean startup methodology the opportunity to hear insights from leaders in embracing and deploying the core principles of the lean startup methodology. The day-long event will feature a mix of panels and talks focused on the key challenges and issues that technical and market-facing people at startups need to understand in order to succeed in building successful lean startups.

Join the startup community at the Accelerator Centre in Waterloo to share the ideas explored at the conference via the live stream.

You often hear people focusing on the internal parts of agile.  Often these are the things the scrum master is supposed to facilitate during a sprint like daily stand-up etiquette, burn down charts, planning poker, retrospective games etc.  These are all useful tools but ignore the elephant in the room if you happen to be a startup: how to you build the backlog?

Even more, how do you build a backlog that will define and evolve a sustaining product in a profitable market before you run out of cash?!  That, my friends is the primary challenge of a startup and so many of the rituals of agile development alone wont hep you with.   I don’t intend to diminish the value of something I’ve spent the last decade learning and practicing, but in the last few years I’ve learned where it belongs relative to other important factors that can’t be ignored. If you’ve ever been the Product Owner I’m sure you’ll agree that it take a hell of a lot of effort to build and maintain a backlog including the efforts of many people.

There has been little in the way of process to address this fundamental challenge in a way that was as compatible with the style of agile development – at least until lately.  This is why LeanStartups and Customer Development resonated so strongly for me.

Fitting tactical level thinking (where agile excels) into a compatible strategic framework is a powerful combination.  I’m not sure of the distinction between the Product Manager Role and the traditional Product Owner as drawn.  It appears that the Product Manager is defined to be more strategic and have more market orientation.  I’m not sure I buy the separation in my world where companies are small and people are stretched thin but I can see it in larger orgs.  I wonder abotu it because the Prouct Owner stops being the “owner” of anything and really just a middle manager of sorts with dubious authority.  In my experience the way for developers to have confidence in a backlog is to have them build it or have market data.  Not sure I’d want that Product Owner job.