The Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at NYU’s Stern School of Business is hosting a workshop series, Lean Startup Summer Boot Camp, beginning this Friday, July 12. Workshop sessions, which are open to the public, occur every Friday for five weeks, ending on August 9. Participants will hear about the latest approaches to product strategy as well as fundamental design thinking concepts from user experience guru Will Evans. The “Lean Startup” approach promises to nix faulty business plans early on, cut out unnecessary strains on budget and time, and help entrepreneurs develop ideas with the greatest potential for success and the lowest risk of waste.
Participants can choose to attend one to five sessions; one session will run you $25 while registering for all five comes to just $80. Registration can be found on the workshop homepage. Sessions last from 1pm until 3:30pm and are located at Stern’s Berkley Entrepreneurship Center on the fourth floor of the Kaufman Management Center at 44 West 4th Street.
Below, is a brief description of each Lean Startup Summer Boot Camp topic:
July 12: Introduction to Design Thinking
This session invites guests to think critically and conceptually about design. Areas of product need are established first, followed by multi-solution problem solving, insight generation, and fast-paced product development to meet the identified need.
July 19: Fundamentals of Lean Startup Thinking
In this session, participants learn to examine early customer feedback and product testing with the express intention of cutting losses. Lean Startup Thinking is ultimately about preventing problematic business ideas from becoming long-term disasters.
July 26: LeanUX and Customer Development for Product Testing
This workshop focuses on customer research for startups. Strategically applied customer research creates the “MVP” or Minimum Viable Product. Again, those developing new business ventures will learn how to detect their vulnerabilities rather than wasting time and revenue on faulty product.
August 2: Scaling Product Teams with Lean Kanban
The fourth workshop shifts away from product design and to team-based product development. Participants learn how to create and manage a team effectively, with an eye toward bolstering a startup through the best possible distribution of responsibility.
August 9: Basics of Demand Creation, Pitch MVP and Analytics
The final session looks at the end-point of startups and product design: marketed distribution. Again, with an emphasis on “lean” costs and temporal efficiency, this session covers the basics of branding a startup without depleting the company budget.
