agile, bmnt, business model, corporate innovation, customer development, diux, dod, h4d, hacking for defense, lean, lean launchpad, lean startup, nsa, stanford, steve blank

1. Stand and Deliver:
Weekly Prep For Your Presentation
and Beyond
Tom Byers, Pete Newell, Joe Felter, Steve Blank
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International License

2. Before Class - Prepare

3. Making a better presentation
• You team should now be smarter than everyone in
the room about your canvas
• You still might not have Product Market Fit, but…
• if you are feeling confident that you’ve validated
portions of your canvas remind people which portions
(or which portions you don’t feel confident about)
• Update past portions of the canvas and diagrams

4. Mission Model Canvas
• Did you update all the boxes on the canvas?
• Do all parts of the canvas make sense together?
• Value Prop for each beneficiary
• Mission Achievement for each beneficiary
• Deployment and Buy-in for each beneficiary
• Can each team member present the entire Canvas?

5. Value Proposition Canvases
• Do you have a value proposition canvas for each
Beneficiary/Stakeholder?
• Does it match the mission model canvas?
• Can each team member present it?

6. Can You Diagram the Relationships?
• Can you draw the relationship between the
beneficiaries?
• Can you diagram the path of how the product gets
physically deployed?
• Can you draw the relationship between the
people/organizations who need to buy-in?
• Can you diagram how the product gets acquired?
• ($’s, time, organizations)

7. Minimum Viable Product
• What is your MVP?
• What are you trying to learn?
• What did you learn?
• Is the MVP helping you validate more of your
canvas are you still stuck on Value Prop

8. In Class - Deliver

9. Summarize Your Learning
• For the teaching team and guests, remind us:
• Quickly (<2 minutes) through the key learnings to date
• March us through the canvas
• Beneficiaries, Value Proposition, Deployment, Buy-in, Mission
Achievement
• Then start this weeks presentation

10. Acknowledge Feedback
• If you’ve gotten feedback in office hours
• Repeat the feedback. “In office hours we heard…”
• Tell us what you’re going to do with the feedback
1. We heard it, but we’re going to ignore it (truly ok)
2. We need to think about it for a few days
3. Wow. That was helpful we’re going to...
• Same holds for mentor, liason and sponsor feedback...

11. Blow the Whistle on Sponsor Issues
• Sponsor Issues are teaching team issues
• Scream loud, hard and often to the teaching team
• Do not wait
• Get DIUx and Liaison help

12. Thinking On Your Feet
• Stall if you need more time to think on your feet
• Repeat the question back by saying, “What I think I
heard you ask is”, and then repeat their question asking
for confirmation
• If you don’t know the answer, it’s ok to say:
• That’s a great question. We need to caucus on the
answer. When would you like us to get back to you?
• Don’t be defensive
• You’re a team
• Ask your team members for help answering

13. If the Teaching Team Doesn’t Get It
• If you actually did what we’re asking, but we don’t
get it
• Say, “I think we did what you asked, for but I’m probably
not explaining it correctly.”
• Then try to explain it differently. Ask your team
members to help explain it.
• If we still don’t get it, try to listen to us and say, “We
need to take notes and see if can get you the answer”

14. Take Notes
• We are giving you comments for action not just
information
• One or more of you ought to be taking notes
• Those comments should be reflected in your work
next week

15. Team Problems
• There’s no shame in interpersonal conflict
• Bad things happen when you deny it exists and/or
don’t ask for help
• Failure Modes:
• No one loves your initial idea
• Thinking this is an incubator rather than a class
• Inability to pivot
• Team member too busy for Customer Discovery
• Want to “build the product” not MVPs
• …

16. Denial
• Bad things happen in the real world
• potential customer falls through, co-founder quits,
customers aren’t buying, etc.
• It’s OK to be depressed for a few days… then pick
yourself up, process what happened and come with
a new plan
• Don’t spread panic or doom and gloom, but …
• Don’t spin it to yourself, or your co-founders or
investors
• And definitely don’t spin it to your teaching team

17. Exuberance
• Great things happen
• customers grab the product out of your hands, VCs
throwing term sheets at you, etc.
• Don’t confuse a few blips of enthusiasm with a
repeatable and scalable business
• Worst thing you can do is premature scaling
• Have specific goals of what constitutes validation
• Don’t confuse fund-raising with successful anything

18. After This Class – Plan

19. Lots of Choices
1. Good class, learned a lot about Lean and the
DOD/IC, now back to the rest of my life
2. Would like to figure out how to work with the
DOD/IC in some way
• see DIUx or your sponsor
3. Would like to continue to work on solving this
particular problem
• see your sponsor, StartX, DIUx or NSF I-Corps
4. Would like to get VC funding and create a
dual-use product

20. And then the next few weeks
• Mission Achievement
• Activities
• Resources
• Partners
• Cost Structure to Support Mission Achievement