Cohort analysis is a powerful tool to understand your customers and ensure the product decisions you're making are actually creating a better service for your users. How being better should come before, and ultimately leads faster to, being bigger.

We'll look at what a cohort analysis is, how to use one in your startup or company, and how you can get started quickly with tools you're already using. Let me know if you have any thoughts or ideas for focus!

Learn how to make your own sketchnotes - whatever your drawing skill!

Background: We are building https://www.blossom.io to help teams to apply 'lean' to how they develop products.

The Challenge: We want to provide them with a lean kanban board as suggested default template so they can get started immediately (low barrier).

But at the same time we are aware that providing a sensible default is very important and we could potentially end up with suggesting a half-assed board to thousands of people. This is quite a moral burden and therefore we ask for help & input of the community and people smarter than us :)

Learning by doing, Prototyping, Iterations... are concepts that coexist in both worlds. The possibility of combining them arises. However, one would wonder: are we really speaking the same language on both? What do both approaches have in common? In what do they diverge? Can we, and should we, completely mix them? Should we concatenate them, and create a workflow that takes advantage of the strengths of both? Can we have the right approach for the right time? All this, and possibly more, is what we plan on dealing with in this proposed “Show and tell.”

If no one cares about your blog, they won't care about your business either. The session will cover 10 tips for effective business blogging, with an emphasis on lean principles (short posts, understanding and optimizing metrics, etc).

Social science has a wide variety of data analysis methods that can be used by startups (e.g. t-test, ANOVA, Chi-Square). This session will highlight a few of these data analysis methods, by linking them to particular types of research design and data. We are hoping to collaboratively develop a set of tools that can be used to assess the validity of different business models, by mapping business hypotheses to specific research methods and data analysis tools.

* Best practices for creating a real social network
* Allowing users self-expresion
* Balancing cooperation and competition between users
* Promoting UGC user-generated content
* Encouraging discovery and creation of groups of interest

How is lean working in established & enterprise businesses? What's involved in introducing it? Also in these companies - techniques to use to reduce/rank the number of features in an MVP.

The most difficult part of Lean seems to be applying it in practice - especially to overcome our own inherent focus & bias, and focus on running experiments in an effective manner.

How can we best improve our processes? Should we work with an external advisor, team up with another startup and do frequent meetings? Are tools like Lean Launchlab, Lean Canvas & co useful for this purpose?

Hypothesis-driven approaches help with focusing on the right unknowns from a business context, while keeping your eyes open to new opportunities. Test-driven development – write the test first, then the code to pass it – is being used to greater and greater success in software.

From an entrepreneurial standpoint it seems that hypotheses can help us choose better things to test, while the world of TDD has tried-and-true approaches to managing those tests.

What can each of these approaches gain from the other?

Used in educational, psychology and design fields, diary studies are effective ways to get under the skin of potential customers, and gain insights about their problems and ideas of how to solve them.

This is a method of applying the "Genchi Genbutsu" (Toyota way) and Steve Blank's "Get out of the building", as covered in the Lean Startup book.

Joel founded Buffer (http://bufferapp.com) and used Lean Startup to take it from idea to first paying customer in 7 weeks ! And that was part-time bootstrapping!

Joel will be in Hong Kong, but has agreed to Skype in for a session. We'll do the In The Founders' Studio interview format, so everyone can take the role of the interviewer and dig into topics useful to them.

Most examples of Lean Startup focus on a small, agile company that sets out to disrupt an existing, less manoeuvrable market. How should you adapt your methodology if your competition is also using Lean principles?

At the Balanced Team conference in SF in fall 2011, Moses Hohman gave this great talk (http://www.slideshare.net/balancedteam/06-sat-moses-hohman-balanced-team-conference-talk). We have iterated his tool - I call it the skills pie - since. I would present the tool, followed by a (small) group discussion/exercise on how to grow your team / find collaborators.

Working in a startup with a small team and attacking any market is challenging enough — but for those really daring and wanting to also launch on multiple platforms can prove even more daunting. It can prove really difficult to apply structured Lean principals. This session will explore how to actually still use Lean Startup principals and making sure to maintain a strong product vision while iterating on product development and building toward a great experience on various platforms.

What are the best tactics to apply for your product, service or platform in order to achieve best monetization in a freemium strategy.

Case Scenarios: Instagram, Angry Birds, Evernote & so on..

Is there anyone attending who has experience of applying the Business Model Canvas to a professional services business?

I would really value your input on how I can use this to go through the options for my business with a view to scaleability and growth.