Lean Startup Conference 2013 Takeaway 1 – Experiments Improve Learning

In the recently concluded Lean Startup 2013 Conference it was evident that enterprises of all sizes including Governments are now interested in delivering value to their customers by developing new and innovative products. Jack Welch says that Shareholder Value is a result and not the primary constituent of value delivered by a company. Customers, employees and products are the primary constituents of a corporation’s value.
Experiments Improve Learning 
The Lean Startup focuses on maximizing value by minimizing waste. Sixty to Ninety percent of ideas do not improve the metrics they were intended to improve. A third of ideas can cause a statistically significant positive change, One third of them don’t result in statistically significant change and one third of them result in statistically significant negative change. Intuition and expert opinion are extremely poor gauges of value our ideas deliver to users says Ronny Kohavi(GM Experimentation Platform ,Microsoft). If we are not running experiments to test the value of new ideas before completely developing them, chances are two thirds of the work we do will deliver zero or negative value to our customers.