Hilary Weber, CEO of Opportu, has been asked to speak at the Girls in Tech national Catalyst conference for the second time in two years. Her topic will be “Unleash Your Hidden Power”. The workshop was inspired by her work on innovation with both large enterprises and startups – it is designed to help professional women own their past and use it to their advantage in the future. Fellow speakers include Amy Jo Martin, best-selling NY Times author; Kara Swisher of Re/code; Kym McNicholas, Emmy Award Winning CBS reporter; Monique Morrow, CTO of Cisco Systems, and many more. For more information about the Girls in Tech Catalyst conference, click here.
The Lean Startup method teaches entrepreneurs and startups to get to market fast with a “Minimum Viable Product” in order to generate the “Maximum Validated Learning.” Instead of focusing on the question, “Can this product be built?”, entrepreneurs are urged to ask, “Should this product be built?” and “Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?” The Lean Startup method teaches startups to use an iterative process: Build, Measure, Learn, Repeat. The goal is to avoid the pitfall of spending too much time planning before getting to market and getting feedback from customers.
Startup teams sometimes interpret this advice to mean that planning is a waste of time. Because they are so overwhelmed with all of the tasks they must accomplish, and the extreme uncertainty they are facing, they often feel that time for planning is a luxury they cannot afford. However, in my experience, “Just do it” is not the best operating principle for startups to follow. Building a minimum viable product, and generating maximum validated learning in the least amount of time, requires coordinated effort that can only be achieved by planning. The challenge is how to achieve the right level of planning. Too much time spent on planning is a waste, and too little time spent leads to confused priorities, unclear and conflicting roles, and ultimately, to poor performance.
Minimum Viable Planning is a solution to this problem. As with the Minimum Viable Product, the Minimum Viable Plan is not designed to be perfect. It is designed to provide the minimum amount of information needed to guide and coordinate team activities. Through use, over time, the plan should be refined and improved to meet the specific needs of the team. The goal is to generate Maximum Validated Learning through an iterative process: Assess, Plan, Implement, Learn and Repeat.
Your team might benefit from a discussion of your planning approach:
• Have you specified the key results you must achieve? Have you clarified who is accountable for achieving them?
• Do team members agree that your plan has the right level of specificity to focus and align team efforts?
• Is the tam prepared to track progress against your plan, and modify it based on experience, so that it becomes more useful over time?
If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” your team may want to work on developing a Minimum Viable Plan. The idea is to keep it simple, but, as Steve Jobs pointed out, “Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But its worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
The CEO of Opportu, Hilary Weber, has been named as an Industry Fellow at U.C. Berkeley’s Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (SCET) by the Center’s founder and Chief Scientist, Professor Ikhlaq Sidhu. Professor Sidhu is also the founder of the Berkeley Innovation Index, for which Hilary Weber is an official Contributor. To learn more about the SCET, click here.
A new Executive Education course on innovation is being offered in fall of 2016 by the College of Engineering. The course, entitled “Igniting Intrapreneurship and Innovation” is being taught by Lee Fleming, Ph. D., Professor Naeem Zafar, Robert Weinberg, Ph.D., and Hilary Weber, CEO and founder of Opportu Startup Innovation. Participants will come away with an actionable “to do” list they can implement in their organizations to create culture change and spark innovation. The program will provide practical knowledge and skills that can help them not only increase innovation, but also help their established companies attract and retain talent and succeed in an increasingly competitive marketplace. For more information or to register for this course, please click here.
Adriana Gascoigne, the founder of Girls in Tech, a global non-profit with more than 28,000 members, announced that a new GIT Boot Camp was being launched after receiving multiple requests from chapters all over the world. The boot camp includes 3 parts: Confidence, Leadership and Entrepreneurship. The boot camp was co-designed and will be facilitated both virtually and on-site by Hilary Weber, CEO and founder of Opportu Startup Innovation. For more information on Girls in Tech and their programs, please click here.
Opportu’s founder and CEO, Hilary Weber, was asked by visiting professor, Ricardo San Martin, to teach his class on Teams for his Entrepreneurship course in the College of Engineering at U.C. Berkeley. Hilary’s approach to the class was to make it highly experiential and interactive, with everyone working in teams, focusing on a common goal. A surprise challenge was thrown in during the class and the teams had to recover from the challenge in a very short time. Feedback from Professor San martin after the class was that “his students said that they want more classes like the one on Teams”. For more information on the College of Engineering at U.C. Berkeley, click here.
Hilary Weber, founder and CEO of Opportu Startup Innovation, was tapped as a Contributor to the Berkeley Innovation Index (BII), a breakthrough research initiative founded by Professor Ikhlaq Sidhu, founder and head of the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at U.C. Berkeley. The BII is a holistic and comprehensive approach to assessing current capacity for innovation at an individual, group or organizational level. Contributors include industry partners and academics from around the globe. To learn more about the Berkeley Innovation index, click here.
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