New Venture Milestones

During the past 12 months in Business School @Graziadio, I've been involved with 3 different startups including EarlyX, Pepperdine.Us, and Get Ed on Budget. The most challenging part is not coming up with a a solution to a problem/frustration, but rather executing the idea to find a repeatable sales model.

Here are a list of milestones which are crucial steps during a new venture creation:

Identify problem or frustration you seek to solve. I've had a lot of success using Lean Canvas Model. Be clear about what business you're in, how you'll be making money, and how that ties to your goals.

Naturally, your venture will fit into one of the following:

Each quadrant offers it's own set of challenges and rewards.

Determine how big is the market size. I've found IBIS World to be an excellent source for a top-down market research (free for students). You will also want to perform a bottom-up market analysis which would meet your top-down projections of total, addressable, reachable and likely to buy market.

Develop the Concept / Prototype
Develop a prototype. Recent innovations in software have reduced the time and capital required to build a Minimum Viable Product. Determine whether to proceed with further development based on initial feasibility experiments. This is a low cost step relative to future product development investments. You should figure out whether a real market exists or fix flaws in your assumptions. Some questions to consider are:

• Is there an opportunity with sufficient up-side gain relative to necessary risks and costs?
• What has the test taught us which modifies our assumptions and product dev objectives and target markets?

Completion of a Prototype 

Obtain any useful information from carefully analyzing prototype development. Understand what caused road blocks, disappointments and how did you overcome them. Consider the following...

• What assumptions did you make about dev time, cost? How has that changed?
• How does your findings affect financial needs and timing?
• What did you learn about labor, material, equipment availability and cost? 
• How do your findings affect your pricing plans?
• Do your assumptions about 

Initial Financing

Businesses must compete in capital and product markets to survive. Securing financing is an opportunity to learn about venture's acceptable financial and expense structure. First round funding can be used to test concept's potential, finance product dev, or initiative sales. I've found financial pro forma projections to be one of the most challenging parts of new venture creation. Investors will look at this very closely, I suggest you get an experienced advisor to look at this before pitching it to investors. There are several templates you can find on the web for startup finance model.

Pilot Project

Pilot projects are a great way to challenge your assumptions and validate value from your customers point of view. Consider launching your product/service to a minimal audience as part of your pilot project. Observations from pilot projects can be used to improve performance and cost estimes. 

Product / Market Fit Testing

By far, one of the most common reasons why startups fail is because they build products which aren't used. What is your target market for your product? What is the desired set of characteristics/features of your product for this market? Some additional questions to answer:

• Have customers bought your product? Why or why not?
• Is it really different from competition?

Re-design or re-direction 

Use findings from pilot project and marketing testing to redesign or select a different target market. This is proportional to the differences between what your product offering is vs market need. Examine your basic assumptions concerning market size, segments, investment needs, pricing and financials.

Scale Up Production

After incorporating feedback from pilot project, production run test will reveal a new set of problems which need to be solved. Most important thing is to note true cost of producing a steady flow of product and meeting quality standards. The last thing you want is customer rejection as that will increase dissatisfaction and waste huge amounts of resources. 

First BIG Deal

This is the first sale to a major account. In B2C market, this could be a deal with a major distributor. In B2B world, this could be a sale to another major company. Some questions to ponder about:

• How does product compare to competitor in the real world?
• Continue or change initial selling method?
• Service layer agreements?
• What are quality control expectations?

Competition Reaction

How will competitors respond to your venture or product? Plan possible responses depending on what moves your competitors make. You want to know what your rivals competitive position is. I've found Mind Tools Strategy toolkit to be a very effective summary of 2 years of Business School.

Investor Pitch : Get Ed On Budget

I had a pitch infront of a few members from Tech Coast Angeles, BeachMint and a local early stage Venture Capital firm tonight.

Get Ed On Budget is a business model innovation helping students learn to earn. It accomplishes what most schools don't do today which is personalize the learning experience to match your goals by finding out who you are and where you're trying to go.

Here are some take aways and feedback about my pitch:

• Pitch as business owner, not as a consumer. At times, consumers and business owners have differing interests. For example, as a small business restuarant owner, you wouldn't want consumers to hang around after their meal, though consumers would.
• Be specific, show details. Pick a location, take a screenshot, any detail helps
• Show average consumer spending, before and after your product 
• Don't over promise the financials. If your financials look better than Google's, take another stab at it.
• Show a demo 
• It's amazing how many pitches end while investors are wondering..."What is it that you're selling"
  
  
• 50/50 is about right for revenue share deals. At first you need them more than they need you, then you use it as leverage
• Pick a niche market for validation and product/market fit
• Cost to build software is $
  
  
• Give 100% away initially to prove market validation
• Get 10 people to pay you to prove product 
• Don't use slang words, don't expect investors to keep up latest phrases. For instance, what is a MOOC?
• Consumers will compare your price with others, and if significantly cheaper, then they perceive your product to have lower quality. For instance, $11.99 vs $3000, consumers think you are sacrificing quality
• Focus on 1 thing and do it really well.
• Don’t undersell your experiences.
• Don’t ever lead with a negative, be confident about what you know.
• Cost of selling to retail is very high...gotta get 5x retail margin
• Consider sales cycle, how long is it? How long will you need to persuade them decision makers to purchase?

Persuasion: Universal Principles that Guide Human Behavoir

Dr. Robert Cialdini, Professor of Psychology and Marketing @Arizona State University, has written the most convincing evidence describing the principles which guide human behavior in the context of Persuasion.

In decision making, you would think that one would consider all the possible solutions and alternatives before making up their mind on a decision. In todays environment  the number of choices leads to an explosion of choices and alternatives.

Here are the 6 shortcuts we use to make decisions:
1. Reciprocity
People are obliged to give back to others the form of behavior, gift or service that they have received first.

Examples:
A favor for a favor.
Easiest way to get a smile is to give one first.
A waiter who gives you candy with the bill increases his tips by 14%.
Personalized and unexpected.

2. Scarcity
People want more of the things they have less of.
It's not enough to tell people about the benefits or uniqueness of your product, but also explain what they stand to lose by not purchasing your product.

Examples:
Concord flight sales doubled when it was announced that it was no longer economical to fly.

3. Authority
People follow the lead of credible and knowledgable experts.

Examples:
Physicians display diploma on the wall.
Customer testimonials. Science says it doesn't matter if the person giving testimonial is related or has something to gain from the testimonial.

4. Consistency
People like to be consistent with the things they have said or done.

Examples:
Ask for small commitments prior to asking for a bigger one. Consider newsletters which lead to subscribers purchasing product down the line.
Voluntary, public and active commitments in writing.
When patients write appointment details

5. Liking
People prefer to say yes to people they like.

3 Factors of why people like you:
Similar to you.
Complement you.
Cooperate with you on mutual goals.

Examples:
Exchanging personal information, similarities or interests before getting down to business.

6. Consensus
People look to actions and behaviors of others to determine actions of their own.

Examples:
75% of the guests who stayed in your hotel room re-used towels. Think about how this will affect your behavior.

Employing these costless shortcuts in an ethical manner will considerably increase the chances of persuading someone by your request. 

http://www.influenceatwork.com

Influence at Work is a great resource I recommend you read.

The Problem Interview

Case Study of Product, Market, and Customer Validation

As you start out on a new venture, whether it be a product or service you seek to sell, it is crucial to understand your customer's point of view before coming up with a solution. Many entrepreneurs fail because they start out with a solution prior to defining a problem. This ultimately leads to a product which no one wants to use.

One of the ventures I have co-founded is to disrupt the higher education space. Here are some thinks we considered during the problem interview:

Product Risk: What is the problem/frustration? What are the top 3 problems?

Market Risk: Who is the compettion? How do customers solve the problem today?

Customer Risk: Who owns the pain/frustration?

My co-founder and I identified a group of 10 customers from three segments and conducted a face to face group interview/discussion. Here is the script we followed...

Welcome:
Thanks customers for participation. Begin telling them the about your product and the problem as you understand it, and see if it resonates with them.

Customer Segments:
How old are you?
Do you take courses online?
etc...

Tell Your Story:
Tell a story which includes use case about the problem/frustration you are going to solve. Does this resonate with you?

Problem Ranking:
Prioritize problems from customers point of view. This will help focus your efforts during product development by working on the most desired features first.

Explore Customers Views:
No script is needed for this. A heart to heart talk about how big of a problem is this and what the customers are currently doing about it. Understand the workflow from cradle to grave. Clearly identify 'must-have', 'nice-to-have' or 'don't-need'.

Wrap Up:
Thank customers for their participation and follow up with demo.

Document Results:
I would recommend having someone document your results. This is very important as you will likely forget some comments which can be extremely valuable in the future, especially if you pivot.

Ash Muarya has a book titled "Running Lean" which talks about this in further. Ash was the former CTO and friends with my Entrepreneurial Operations professor Kyle Murphy. Kyle has taught me critical skills about operations & execution of newly created ventures.

Social Network Analysis: Centrality, Closeness

I've been hacking at social network analysis concepts using some sample data from livejournal.com. I will have another post with code snippets of this analysis, but here are some concepts I've learned so far during my analysis:

The data gathered from livejournal is done using a BFS like algorithm called Snowball Sampling.

Snowball Sampling:  uses a small pool of initial informants to nominate, through their social networks, other participants who meet the eligibility criteria and could potentially contribute to a specific study.

Pseudocode:

# start with central node

# get friends of central node

# for every one of friends:

#     sample friends of friends

#     For every friend of friend

#        sample friends of friends of friends

*Date is stored in Pajek format using simple text file. Python NetworkX library contains useful methods of analysis, including Pajek output support.

Though there are advantages & disadvantages to Snowball Sampling, humans have a limited sense of perception in social networks. This phenomenon is known as Horizon of Observability. In other words, we have a good idea of who are friends are, but less insight to friends-of-friends,  and considerably or almost no knowledge of friends-of-friends-of-friends.

One of the first approaches for analyzing social networks is to measure power, influence or other characteristics of people based on connections. 

Degree Centrality: # of connections that a node has.

Closeness Centrality: How close is this node to celebrity nodes (lower distance to high degree individuals).

Boundary Spanners: Nodes who act as bridges between 2 or more communities that wouldn't be able to communicate with one another.

Eigenvector Centrality: A node is central to extent that node is connected to others who are central. In other words, a node is high on Eigenvector centrality is connected to many other nodes who are connected to many others.

PageRank is similar to eigenvector centrality, but the algorithm scales much beteter to very large networks which change over time. PageRank is an iterative process, knows as anytime algorithm.

Centrality metrics are point-measures on the network. It does not tell us why a high centrality visionary is surrounded by followers, or what forces bring or tear people apart. Inorder to understand those concepts further, we need to consider deeper point measures such as cliques and clusters. 

The 4 Hour Chef

Tim Ferris has a new book called "The 4 Hour Chef" and here are some summary notes.
Whether you think Tim is a snake oil salesman or a self promoting guru, I find his work interesting.
In the spirit of his work, here's a 1 page summary.

Acronym DSSS
Deconstruction:
What are the LEGO blocks? LEGO blocks being the units of work for a goal.

Selection:
Which 20% of the blocks will give me 80% of the outcome I want?

Sequencing:
In what order should I learn the blocks?

Stakes:
How do I set up real stakes to guarantee follow-through?

Acronym CaFE
Compression:
Can I encapsulate the most importnat 20% into easily graspable pieces?

Frequency:
How frequently should I practice?

Encoding:
How do I anchor new material to what I already know?

I recommend you read all of Tim's books, they are thought provoking with creative, real life stories.

Scalability : A Case for Cloud Computing

Scalability is the ability of a system, network, or process, to handle a growing amount of work in a capable manner or its ability to be enlarged to accommodate that growth. It impacts performance and efficiency of your system.

Scalability can also impact business if you're cloud application can't handle users beyond a certain threshold.  Moreover, reducing the latency between your customers and business can improve user experience, thus; encourage repeat usage/visitors.

Hardware resources which can impact your ability to scale include:

• CPU

• Memory 

• Disk (capacity & throughput)

• Network Bandwidth

Node: Physical server, virtual machine, or cluster of servers

Data Node: Contains data used by application

Compute Node: Contains application code logic

There are 2 approaches to scaling:

1. Vertical Scaling (Scaling Up) : increase overall application capacity by increasing resources in existing node

1. Horizontal Scaling (Scaling Out) : increase overall application capacity by adding new nodes

Vertical Scaling is often less complex, as you're throwing more hardware at the problem.

Horizontal Scaling is more complex, and architecture focused.

For more detailed account of Scalability...I suggest you look at Cloud Architecture Patterns Develop cloud-native applications by Bill Wilder

Business School....On Hold

I have made the decision today to put Business School....On Hold and pursue a graduate program @Stanford emphasizing in Mining Massive Data Sets. 

This decision is primarily based on:

• Entrepreneurship: One of my reasons for enrolling in b-school was to learn about idea generation, incorporation, finance, marketing, operations, and strategy for new ideas or early stage ventures. Upon completing the Entrepreneurship track @Pepperdine Graziadio School of Business and Management, I have gained practical experience in forming my own startup.
• Maker vs Manager: I love to work with people to create and deliver products. 
• Leadership vs Management: My volunteer experience in non-profit world has taught me to lead with action, and inorder for you to act, one must be informed with practical working experience. I believe that technical leadership requires you to keep your skills sharp, and management simply is too distracting from this goal.
• Opportunity Cost: The world of computer science has changed since I finished my graduate studies @USC in 2007. The amount of data has been growing exponentially, distributed systems require new algorithms and open source technologies. There's too much fun happening in this space, and I'm fascinated by what the future holds. 
• Higher Education is broken: Higher education is expensive, long and is not preparing students for the jobs of today or tomorrow  I find myself spending 3 hours a night on Coursera & Udacity, learning about machine learning, distributed systems, and parallel programming. 
• Networking: There are two life changing events in life...the people you meet and the books you read. Meetup is a great tool to network with professionals in your industry. I attend a few meetups a week, connecting and collaborating with intelligent/sincere people.
• Focus: The biggest ingredient to failure is lack of focus. Focus on one thing, be great at it.

Looking back at my experiences in business school, it's been a great learning experience  I simply want to accelerate my learning and fail faster.

Best Career Advice I Ever Got

Bud Caddell, an awesome strategist, gave me the best career advice I've ever got. Whether you are an entrepreneur, intrapreneur  or need some guidance with rest to career paths, use this to help you figure out what your next steps are.

It's summarized in the diagram below:
"What you do well" + "What you want to do"  => Learn to Monetize
"What you do well" + "What we can be paid to do" => Say No!
"What you want to do" + "What we can be paid to do" => Learn to do this better!

Graziadio's Business Case Competition

My team and I participated at the annual Graziadio's VCLL Case Competition 2012 earlier today. 

Case competition requires rigorous strategy setting and financial analysis, plus time management and persuasive presentation. But the impact of management decisions on all stakeholders- from investors to employees to the environment- takes center stage in the Values-Centered Leadership Lab, a student-driven organization at the Graziadio School of Business and Management (GSBM) that promotes hands-on leadership development and collaboration.

Though we didn't win the competition, here are some take aways from today:

• Since you have less than 2.5 hours, assign leads for Situational Analysis, Financials, Implementation and Recommendation...you will run out of time
• Start preparing presentation materials early
• Address alternative solutions...be mindful of the impact of current solution and be able to explain the opportunity cost of alternatives
• Prepare Risk Analysis Management 
• Be clear about your strategy, communicate clearly what you propose to do when
• Include a PEST (Political, Environmental, Social & Technological) Analysis
• Include Porter's Five forces analysis
• Socially, Environmentally, and Ethically Responsible (SEER) Business Strategy Analysis
• Make sure to allow enough time for judges questions...Do not be defensive about your presentation!
• Know who you're audience is...assume it's the company in case study & address them accordingly

References:

SEER

PEST

Porter's Five Forces 

Don't know how to build a company around your hobby or idea?
Are you stuck trying to figure out how to incorporate? Or which structure is right for your business?

DocStoc has made available a free course to help you out. One of our Pepperdine Graduate School of Business alumni, Jason Nazar (founder of docstoc) has made this course available for free. Highly recommend for you to check it out.

How to Start a Business The Complete Guide

Here's a link to his Personal Blog

SEO: How to Primer on a Bootstrap Budget

Many of my friends of mine my friends have spent thousands of dollars on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is meant to be a step by step to the most important things you need to know/do about SEO. You can do this yourself, so no reason to pay thousands of dollars to someone else to do it.

Location information:

Google doesn't use geotags, but Bing does. Go to www.geo-tag.de/generator/en.html and generate your location data. Copy & paste this info into your pages.

Make sure your physical address matches the data on your site.

Site maps helps both users and search engines navigate through your site. Include plenty of text reference which points to other pages in your site.

There are 2 types of sitemaps, XML & HTML. 

Joomla, WordPress and Drupal automatically generate sitemaps. Look at xml-sitemaps.com if you need more help.

Back links. Links help search engines find your site. If nobody cares to link to your site, why should search engines care. There are many tools to do this, but most of these tools don't work (show you all the links pointing to your site).

• type in "linkdomain: domain.com" on yahoo.com 
• type in "linkdomain: domain.com" on google.com
• Majesticseo
• robots.txt contains a link to your sitemap location. You can submit sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools. Similar procedure for Bing. You need to verify ownership of your site before being able to add sitemap.

In addition to organic search index listings, you need to add Local Index (Google Places, Bing local, Yahoo local).

• Search your business on Google Places, Bing local, Yahoo local...chances are your business already exists. Make sure you create a listing for each location.
• Go to these URLs:
• Google Places
• Bing Businessportal
• Yahoo Local
• Add as much information as possible (ie. business website, pictures, staff, keyword text, coupons, promotions, logos, videos etc)
• verify your business
• get customers to post reviews
• Geographic location is important. If you are outside of the center of a city, this can hurt you.
• Submit your site to UBL.org, they will submit your site to other online directories ($130 annual fee)

The Perils of CrossFit

Summer 2012 rolled around and I found myself bored with my usual training regimen. I was not only looking to get into shape, but wanted to push myself past physical and mental limitations. About 5 months ago, I joined CrossFit Eagle Rock.

Overall, CrossFit has made me realize several things which extend to other parts of life.

1. You will fail...but there is only 1 way to achieve success, repetition. 
2. There are many reasons to stop...it's up to you to find 1 reason to keep going. The WHY in life is often more important than the WHAT or the HOW. Why are you doing this?
3. Rome wasn't built in 1 day and neither will your fitness. It takes discipline, persistence, and hard work to achieve your goals. 
4. Fly wheel effect. Small victories will lead to incredible results over time. 
5. The power of a team. You're only as good as the people you train with. Your team members give you motivation, encouragement, and a set of benchmarks to measure your progress relative to others.
6. Integrity. Don't cheat. If you do, you'll only be cheating yourself.

Check out this video of one of the endurance classes I took with Jason.

GitHub: A More Efficient Way to Blog

Most of my current activities have been in the area of data mining and machine learning. The best way to keep up with my updates is to follow me @GitHub account.

For developers, GitHub is far more efficient & effective tool for blogging.

Occasionally, I will blog about challenges and / or summaries of conclusive work.

Mars Science Laboratory: We Did It!

After its successful launch on Nov. 26, 2011, and a 36 week (254 days) journey, the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover is on the surface of Mars! Curiosity landed on Mars at 10:32 p.m. PDT, Aug. 5, 2012.

This was a special day for all of us @ Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As senior software engineer and a member of the Global Navigation Satellite Systems group for NASA, this was a historic day. Our team has played an integral part in calibrating the landing gear. The calibration of landing gear during descent sequence has been successfully tested by a F-18 a year prior to launch. This was by far the most complicated landing sequence ever attempted. We have provided high rate data clock/orbit products to help Curiosity stay on course. Mission well done!

The complexity of the landing sequence is seen in this video below:

Here is the actual video from the descent:

Congratulations to our colleagues in the web group for designing a great user experience for people around the world to witness this historic event. To find out more about Mars Science Laboratory, visit MSL.

I encourage you to check out our realtime precise point positioning data products (popularized by many Location Based Services) at Global Differential GPS.

President Obama called today and expressed his thoughts, here is the video.

Follow me on twitter (at armjan) for latest news about MSL.

Higher Education Distrupted!

Higher Education is Broken:
In the past few hundred years, everything has evolved with the exception of the classroom. Higher education is broken for the following reasons:

• Rise in tuition has increased over 200% in the past 30 years
• Higher education curriculum has not kept up with certain fast paced industries (technology, marketing, etc), thus graduates have a widening gap between skills acquired in school vs those needed on the job
• Schools of today can't prepare students for the jobs of tomorrow

There has been a response from the entrepreneurial community regarding this problem. 

Introducing Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs)

A MOOC is an online class which is open to the public. Several ventures have launched in the education space such as Udacity, Coursera, and Edx. 

My personal experience with MOOCs came as I enrolled in Sebastian Thrun's Artificial Intelligence & Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course @Coursera during Fall of 2012. The lectures were engaging, less than 15 minutes each. The pace of the courses was challenging yet doable. 

Meetup.com: Death of the Resume

From my personal experience, meetup.com has transformed the job searching and career mentoring dramatically. You can instantly connect with local members of your community based on interest and skill. Meetups can be a great way to find out about new job and career opportunities. Besides the element of networking, meetups will often host a series of talks/workshops to advance your knowledge in a particular topic. Meetups have a good mixture of variety, depth and real people who can help you.

TechSmith Product Review: Jing

If you don't know about Jing, continue reading. Jing is a screen capture utility, from TechSmith (makers of Camtasia), which allows you to share images/video of your screen with others. The free version allows you to record for 5 minutes, which is a great way to keep your message simple and to the point.
Here's where you can find Jing:
http://www.techsmith.com/download/jing/default.asp
Here's a sample of a recent recording I did using Jing:

View on screencast.com »
I've used this method of screensharing for the following use cases:

• Share insights regarding particular products of interest with your peers in a hands on kind of way
• Demo your app to coworkers, customers and investors
• Create short tutorials illustrating users product features and capabilities

I recently came across kera.io (www.kera.io) which takes screen capture in your app to a whole another level. Make sure to check it out.

Making Yourself Irreplacable

Are you invaluable? What about your value to your market place? the people who have the greatest value have used the following 6 factors to get there:

1. Savvy: Knowledge & Intuition 

2. Ability: How well can you do what you're supposed to do

3. Irreplaceability: How easy is it to replace you?

4. Focus: ability to eliminate distractions

5. Connection: build professional relationships

6. Authority: Are you an expert in your field?

Think of your activities throughout the day falling into 2 buckets. Most Valuable Activities (MVA) & Least Valuable Activities (LVA). It goes without saying that you should maximize your MVA while minimizing your LVA.

It is easy to become reactive to your coworkers, losing focus on your long term career focus and career strategy. Write down your destination. Re-assess yourself every few months to determine if your MVAs are helping you get to your ultimate destination.

Have a look at the notes I've taken about how to make yourself irreplaceable http://goo.gl/pbgn6

Harvard Business School Resources

Here's a link to the amazing list of resources available for entrepreneurs from Harvard Business School https://sites.google.com/site/startuptribe/general-information/communications

Innovation Games

Daniel Pink, in his book A Whole New Mind, talks about the benefits of game play to spur creativity and innovation. We have had success in practice playing these games with our peers.
You'll be surprised with the results. I've found great value reading this book. Here is a list of what you can expect:

• Learn how your customers define success
• Discover what customers don’t like about your offerings
• Uncover unspoken needs and breakthrough opportunities
• Understand where your offerings fit into your customers’ operations
• Clarify exactly how and when customers will use your product or service
• Deliver the right new features, and make better strategy decisions
• Increase empathy for the customers’ experience within your organization
• Improve the effectiveness of the sales and service organizations
• Identify your most effective marketing messages and sellable features

Check out how Innovation Games can help your organization http://innovationgames.com/

Higher Education : Disrupted/Democratized

Higher Education is being c/democratized...

You can now enroll in free classes from the worlds most prestigious academic institutions including the likes of:

• Standord/Berkeley (www.coursera.org)
• Udacity (www.udacity.com)
• MITx (http://mitx.mit.edu/)
• Harvard (to debut later this year)

What will this mean for traditional brick/mortar universities?

Does it threaten the traditional university business model?

What Business Models will these new higher learning platforms exhibit?

Are we moving towards a skill based rather than degree based learning?

How will learning analytics shape student learning?

Last semester, I took Sebastian Thrun's Artificial Intelligence course and it was an incredibly valuable journey. I spend most of my free time now taking new course offerings through Coursera & Udacity.

Education Bubble here we come ... 

Lean UX Workshop

Excited about the User Experience for Lean Startups workshop tomorrow: 

Lean UX Basics 

Get introduced to practical UX techniques in a Lean Startup context. You'll learn how a healthy intersection between product management, UX, and development can set up your team to work together so that great product UX is an inevitable outcome.

Customer Development Interviews & Generative Research 
Gain the necessary skills to effectively talk to your customers. You'll survey the worlds of generative and evaluative research and learn the differences between them. You'll learn interview techiques, create a topic discussion guide and practice interviewing. 

Developing product and interface ideas 
Ideation, iteration, sketching...the magic happens here. You'll learn to create many ideas in minutes and how to use information gleaned from customer interviews to create scenarios of use. Then you'll sketch-prototype the ideas and prioritize the best ideas to pursue.

Quantitative and Qualitative Evaluation 
Learn how to best match your questions, hypotheses and unknowns with the right research methods. You'll participate in an in-depth discussion about quantitive vs qualitative research and identify the right strategies for your project.

 

Git Casts

If you're new to Git, and not sure where to begin, I recommend checking out the following screen casts @http://gitcasts.com/