I’m always amazed by all the lean startup events and activity that I have yet to discover.  Yesterday I learned about Lean Day West – a 3 day conference that took place in Sept 2013 and dealt with Lean Startup and Lean UX in the Enterprise.   Lucky for us the talks have been recorded and they are awesome.  If you are at all interested in how to apply lean startup in a non-startup, check them out!  Some of my favorites:

Lean Engineering: Key Principles For Transforming Engineering Into A Full Lean UX Partner

Bill Scott · @billwscott · Senior Director of User Interface Engineering, PayPal

How do you take a gigantic organization like PayPal and begin to transform the experiences? Engineering is often the key blocker in being able to achieve a high rate of innovation. In this talk, Bill Scott will give specific examples on implemented Lean UX in a 13,000 person company, re-factored the technology stack and changed the way engineers work with design & product partners. In addition, Bill will provide additional examples that go back to his early days writing one of the first Macintosh games to his more recent work at Netflix and the power of treating the user interface layer as the experimentation layer.  (Slides)

Building With Lean: A Cross-Functional Pairing Approach

Ben Burton · @bjburton · Software Engineer
Jono Mallanyk · @jonomallanyk · UX Specialist / Senior Designer

Part of the inspiration for lean is to eliminate as much unnecessary work as possible to arrive at a valuable end-product. Methodologies such as Lean UX aim to design the best customer experience in the shortest cycle possible, but how do these approaches apply when it comes to executing and shipping a functional Minimum Viable Product? In this talk, designer Jono Mallanyk and software engineer Ben Burton delve into the hands-on approach they’ve taken to cross-functional pairing to design and build products quickly and effectively. In this talk, they’ll detail how and when to involve execution in the lean process, tools and techniques they’ve found useful for developers and designers working together, and do some live cross-functional pairing to demonstrate their process. At Neo Innovation Labs, Jono and Ben have spent the past 6 months pairing as designer and developer, learning from each other, and honing their cross-functional process to arrive at a truly lean approach to software creation.  (Slides)

Iterative Innovation – Small, Focused Changes Can Lead To Big Successes

Emily Holmes · @uxemily · Director of K12 User Experience, Hobsons

At any large company, it can be difficult for a UX team to be innovative: the roadmap is pre-determined, quick fixes are the objective, revenue and new features are often prioritized over fixing what’s broken. Combine that with an aging infrastructure, and true innovation seems like an impossible goal. This session will examine how the K12 UX team at Hobsons found very small ways to innovate within existing constraints, and gradually built on those successes to move toward the forefront of the company’s product development process. By focusing first on tiny innovations, it is possible to iterate toward big changes within your organization.  (Slides)

Research Rebooted – Why Most Market Research Is Broken, And How Lean Can Help Fix It

Farrah Bostic · @farrahbostic · Founder, The Difference Engine

Based on 10 years designing, managing and conducting market research, Farrah had the opportunity to start with a blank slate on a recent project. In the interests of limited time and tight budgets, she started to experiment with lean techniques for doing research better, and discovered that a lot of what we take for granted about the research process, from study design, to recruitment, to the way we actually talk to customers, is broken. Based on what she learned on that first project, and each project since, Farrah has started to develop some lighter-weight, less expensive and time-consuming, and ultimately more useful ways to conduct research that helps brand and product managers make decisions, and grow business. (Slides)