Lean Offering Workshop

1. Purpose

Before building your Lean Offering(s), the team and you may need another deep-dive to align your mental models, define specific features and plan your next steps towards implementation. This workshop is optional and highly depends on the progress during the Design and Validate Workshop, as well as on your research agenda. You may bring your pre-filled Lean Offering(s) template with user stories helping to understand the basic idea of what "value" and "waste" is, but you know there is more detailed work necessary to start implementation.

In the first part of this workshop, the team gives a recap on the uncertainties and assumptions about the success of their business model (see Business Model, Hypotheses & Experiments). They focus on hypotheses which can only be tested by building and launching their lean offering(s). The main part of this workshop is then used to define the minimum set of features of their lean offering(s). Within this session the team collects user stories. A user story is an informal description of a feature:

As a <user>, I want to ..., [because ...].

After the definition and subsequent selection of the feature set for the lean offering(s), the team can start to clarify certain features by building prototypes (like scribbling screens, storyboards / service processes, or product designs per se with the help of a designer or prototyping expert). After prototyping, it is time to discuss the “minimum viable business”. Which elements of the underlying business model are absolutely essential to create and deliver the lean offering(s) to the market? The team defines this lean version of their business model and then plans the implementation process including all roles and responsibilities.

2. Duration

1 full day + preparation and documentation

3. Participants

• Team Manager

• Team Experts

• Business Design Coach

• Prototyping Expert

• Optional: Designer

4. Preparation

• Agenda defined, participants invited

• Room booked or organised

• External experts invited (e.g. Designer)

• All tools & materials prepared and printed

5. Signs of Success

We consider the Lean Offerings Workshop as a success...

• ...if we have specified a feature set of our lean offering(s) which can be called minimal on the one hand, but represents the DNA of the Business Model and on the other hand helps to answer all open hypotheses and questions.

• ...if we have aligned our mental models by the help of prototypes and clarified what can be seen on every relevant screen, what happens in our service process or how our first product should look like.

• ...if the team is proud of the level of concreteness of the output.

• ...if the project team cannot wait to show their lean offering(s) to the sponsor.

6. Tools & Materials

• 1x Flip chart with paper

• 1x Business Model (already filled from the Design Workshop)

• 1x Hypotheses & Experiments (already filled from the Design Workshop or Validate Workshop)

• 1x Lean Offerings (pre-filled from the Design Workshopor Validate Workshop)

• 1x User Story Cards

• 1x Action Plan (already filled from the Design Workshop)

• 1x Development Board

• 1x Time Timer

• Optional: 2-3 Prototyping notepads (tablet / mobile) depending on project and team size

• Optional: Service Blueprint

• Optional: Further prototyping materials (see Tools for Prototyping & Building)

• Optional: 1x Anti-Bullshit Spray

7. Documentation

• All templates (e.g. Business Model, Hypotheses & Experiments, Lean Offerings, Development Board, Action Plan etc.) are digitised in the Project Workspace; photos of the templates are uploaded to the Project Workspace

• Tasks are documented in the Action Plan

• Optional: The Development Taskboard or any other sprint board can be used to plan the lean offering(s) feature set in sprints and increments

8. Q & A

• What if we have a feature set that is too big for our lean offering(s)? The two axes (ease of implementation and DNA fit) of the Lean Offerings help you to prioritise your user stories. Be honest to yourself!

• What is technically the difference between building lean offerings compared to building a final product? The focus and therefore the trade-offs are different. For the final product you are building to scale (low uncertainty), for your lean offering you are building to learn (high uncertainty). 

• What about features which users don't see but which are necessary for my system to work (e.g. admin area to manage users)? Don't develop any features which you can do manually too. For example: You don't need to have an user management backend system when you can easily enter the users manually into the database. Most of the time, a good database management tool is enough and no backend system is needed.

9. Example Agenda

* P = Presentation | D = Discussion | B = Break | T = Teamwork