Hugo Messer, CEO of Ekipa shares his experience (or more of entire Ekipa) in implementing lean startup practices and their challenges in this presentation.

1. Lean Startup with a distributed team
By HUGO MESSER, Ekipa.co

2. Content
1. About Hugo & Ekipa.co
2. Distributed lean startup: challenges & solutions
3. Creating MVP versus Building Too Much
4. Customer Interviews
5. Summary

3. My lean path
• MBA in Rotterdam
• 2001: I-Clip, first startup
• 2002: Had to work at a publisher
• 2004: Backpacking
• 2005: Bridge
• 2014: Ekipa.co

4. BRIDGE
▪ Global IT Staffing = Remote Colleagues
▪ Bridge Method ©
▪ 10 years experience, office in India & Ukraine

5. Ekipa.co; Canvas

6. Distributed Lean Startup: Challenges
1. Programmer is not sitting besides you
▪Changes take more time
▪Things can take longer
▪Scrum
2. Routing feedback through the team
▪ Team lacks direct talks with users
▪ Slack
▪ Product owner in NL, translates feedback to user stories

7. Distributed Lean Startup: Solutions
▪ Development team
◻ Scrum
◻ Jira
◻ Continuous integration
▪ Marketing team
◻ Rockefeller habits

8. Challenges with implementing Lean startup:
Creating MVP versus Building Too Much
▪ We built way too much > why?
▪ Marketplace: get supply to create demand
▪ B to B: it’s about trust & long sales cycles

9. Customer feedback
▪ No traffic, no data > customer interviews
▪ How to get the right questions?
▪ Huge tunnel vision

10. Sample Survey
1. How do you take on / deliver projects if you don't have the people available?
2. If you consider hiring an external team for a project, how do/would you search?
3. Have a look at a sample team profile http://bridge-teams.com/team/32/bridge-.net-
team.
a. On a scale of 1-10, which items are important for you to see in the profile of your team:
- the company
- projects
- the way they take a project from A to Z (process)
- team details
- profiles/cv's of individual team members
b. What would you like to show about your own team? What did we miss? What would you
remove?
4. What would be the decisive factor to make you work with an external team?
5. What would it take for you to post your first job on our platform?
6. How would you describe our platform in 1-2 sentences to someone else?
7. Who do you know that could benefit from using our platform?

11. Results
We interviewed 50 + people
Expectations
A. Cues on what to develop versus what not
B. Validation of the concept
C. Leads
Result
A. Messy feedback, but we saw patterns
> reviews; from individuals > teams; sales versus post project
A. 95% ‘yes great platform’
B. Few leads

12. Summary
▪ Lean distributed development works
> Use Scrum
> Do it after the MVP ideally
▪ Remote management
> Use the rockefeller habits
▪ B to B: qualitative interviews in structured format
gives clarity + prospects

13. BOOKS about managing remote teams
http://ekipa.co/ebooks

14. CONTACT
hugo@ekipa.co
+31 6 54 230 708
hugomesser
http://www.facebook.com/hugomesser
http://www.linkedin.com/inhugomesser
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