Thursday, June 25, 2015

Nate LS1

  • Intro: The Lean Startup is a book about 21st century management.  How does building a FRC robot and running a FRC team run into the same challenges Eric Ries identified in modern businesses?  How is our FRC team a group of entrepreneurs?
  • Like modern business we need to know what is needed in out product and be able to quickly produce an effective product.  Out FRC team is a group of entrepreneurs because we are basically running a non-profit organization.  To do this we must be able to gain money to use for our robot and other things by our customers why they should support us.

  • Chapter 1: What is productivity?  When building a FRC robot, what specifically is productivity?  Based on this definition, was our team productive during the last build season?
  • Productivity is moving forward towards a goal or product.  This is accomplished by validated learning and positive consumer feedback.  For our team, productivity would be making an effective robot in a timely fashion.  This season we were not very productive. We made a good robot,my it we worked at a very slow pace.  We failed to stay on task to get done what needed to be done.

  • Chapter 3: What did IMVU assume to be true when they designed their product?  How did customers actually behave?  Was there a faster and cheaper way to learn the lesson they learned?
  • IMVU assumed that people who used IM wanted the system to be simplified and all unclusive through all the providers.  The customers actually enjoyed the different systems and like to learn on those.  For this reason, IMVU was not well received and ultimately failed.  It would have been faster and easier to do expiraments involving customer rather than asking hypothetical questions.

  • Chapter 3: What is something that we were unsure of last build season that we experimentally validated?  Was there a faster way to learn what we learned?
  • Last season we expiramented with a ramp on the back of the robot.  We found the correct way to do it multiple times but we never built it.  It would have been better if we had gone ahead and built it the first time instead of figuring it out about ten times over and never using it.

  • Chapter 4: Choose the Zappos, HP, Kodak, or Proctor & Gamble case study.  What assumptions did the Zappos founders make when they started their business?  How did they test their assumptions more efficiently than the IMVU team?
  • The Zappos founders assumed people wanted to buy shoes online.  They tested this with small scale expiraments to test the demand for this.  This was more effective because they validated their assumption before they had a huge launch.

Summary
This reading went over launching a product.  It showed the ways that people typically use compared to better ways that are not used as much.  Typically a business will assume customer reactions to a product and have a large launch in hopes that people will want it.  The lean way involves many small scale expiraments.  This is effective because it shows how the product will be received and what adjustments need to be made.
LS1

2 comments:

  1. For the most part I agree with your definition of productivity, but I think negative feedback would be just as helpful. They tell you what not to do or what to change.

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  2. I would definitely agree that testing something is a faster and more efficient way of learning than guessing. Also with the ramp I believe the reason it was tested multiple times was we couldn't get it to work consistently, but with how many times it was tested we definitely evaluated it with experiments.

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