Build a Culture that Outsmarts Perfectionism by Seppo Helava - The Lean Startup Conference 12/10/14
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The build-measure-learn loop is often accompanied by the frustration-confusion-failure cycle. In other words, implementing Lean Startup methods is hard--particularly when your experiments invalidate a lot of your ideas. In this talk, Seppo Helava, founder at Nonsense Industry, teaches us how he's led his team to overcome perfectionism and become more comfortable with grey areas and failure.
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Build a Culture that Outsmarts Perfectionism by Seppo Helava - The Lean Startup Conference 12/10/14
- 1. Build a Culture That Outsmarts Perfectionism By changing three things about how you lead your team Seppo Helava Co-Founder, Wonderspark @seppohelava
- 3. Me The Team Build
- 4. Me The Team Build
- 6. Distribute Authority Manager What Individual Individual Individual
- 8. Me The Team Build Scope Work Correctly Team Owns Decisions
- 9. Be Nice The cost of iterating quickly is failure. Pay it gladly.
- 10. 15x improvement on D1 Retention 10x improvement on daily per-user monetization The most energized, passionate team
- 11. Provide Extreme Focus Distribute Authority Be Nice
- 12. Q&A
Editor's Notes
- Welcome. My name is Seppo Helava… I’m here to talk to you today about how you can defuse the frustration that’s inherent in a highly iterative workplace, and why the six-month period where we threw the most stuff away was the most satisfying period in my team’s professional career.
- Some art from Fleck - incredibly ambitious long-term project, we knew it’d take years. Our first foray into a Lean Startup-style development. Circumstances beyond our control changed, six months left to achieve impossible goals. - 10x retention, 4x DARPU I tried to steer the ship. Iterated quickly, threw out stuff. TUTORIAL EXAMPLE. Used to frustration, so it didn’t seem strange, but talking one day, realized there was a big problem.
- I’d internalized B-M-L, but hadn’t let anyone else. I would measure. I would learn. Then I’d throw their stuff out and have them build again. What I needed to do was give them responsibility for the entire loop.
- And to do that, I had to change three things.
- In order for someone to own the whole loop, they have to understand why they’re building something & how to measure it. Focused on FEW METRICS. USE AS A RAZOR. Provide EXTREME focus. Make it impossible not to focus on it. Repeat A LOT. Once it’s become part of everyone’s thinking, that’s when you need step 2.
- I’ve been someone who values input & judgment, but working through tutorial, I realized that while I *believed* I’d let people own their work, my *actions* made them automatons. You have a brilliant team!! You don’t want them to be hands. You want them to be brains brains. First extreme focus. Second, authority to make decisions. Tell them WHY not WHAT or HOW. Let go of desire for control. Let the team KILL or CONTINUE. When you do that, you’ve finally closed the loop.
- “Project Weeks” - cross disciplinary teams work to move one thing. Most things will fail. Practice “failure”. Build in that acceptance *systemically*
- Two major ramifications! Easier to throw things away when you’ve done less work. Work is like inertia. Shiny buttons are harder to throw away. Team makes the decisions, so there’s no resentment. You make sure they’re on track, but THEY own it, they have the best information to make the best decision. They know why they’re doing things, and they’ll kill things themselves. There’s a trick, though, and it’s a big one. For this all to work…
- …you have to be nice. Squishy, but most important & likely least intuitive. “Move fast & break stuff” is nice to say, but what does it mean to actually *do*? BANK EXAMPLE. Purchase flow risk. The right response isn’t WAARGH, it’s “What are we doing to fix it, what went wrong… and what can we do next time?” Nothing you can say or do will make someone feel worse if they’re engaged. Don’t make them more scared. You want them to *want* to come to you. Difference between failure & stupidity. Up to you to PAY THE COST (not being angry) to GET THE BENEFIT. Primal reactions are very hard to suppress. Creative collaboration is built on trust. Once broken, impossible to repair. So be nice.
- Summary of results. Overcame impossible odds. Did astonishingly well. Started needing 10x retention, 4x DARPU - DARPU ended up one of the highest ever. BIGGEST THING - huge engagement of team. Passionate. Learned to work differently. Difficult to give up control, but in doing so, finally understood the true power of a team that absolutely loved what we were doing. Thank you.