Week 02 ToDos
1. Watch Lecture Videos
Watch the week 02 lecture videos in advance of your team meeting.
| Problem Fit | Video | Slides |
| Business Requirements | Video | Slides |
| Lean Canvas Model | Video | Slides |
| Hypothesis Testing | Video | Slides |
| Problem Interview | Video | Slides |
Lecture References:
See the course Resources→References for instructions on how to access lecture references.
- Karl Wiegers and Joy Beatty, Software Requirements, 3ed, Microsoft Press, 2013.
- Chapter 1: The essential software requirement
- Chapter 5: Establishing the business requirements
- Steve Blank and Bob Dorf, The Startup Owner’s Manual, K& S Ranch Publishing, 2012.
- Chapter 1: The Path to Disaster: A Startup Is Not a Small Version of a Big Company
- Chapter 3: The Customer Development Manifesto
- Ash Maurya, Running Lean, 2ed, O’Reilly, 2012.
- Chapter 1: Meta-Principles
- Chapter 3: Creating Your Lean Canvas
- Chapter 5: Get Ready to Experiment
- Chapter 7: The Problem Interview
2. Team Building
As a continuation of last week’s efforts to start gelling as a team, spend 20 min together working through this week’s Fast Friends Questions (distributed in class). Make your way through as many questions as you can; all team members should answer all of the questions that the team reaches during this time allotment.
3. Select a Team Leader
Select the team member who will serve as team leader for the first two weeks. See Project→Teamwork for more details on this person’s role. You may have opinions on who the first one should be based on the interactions you’ve had so far. If not, choose the person with the median height. If you have an even number of people, round up.
4. Create a Team Contract
With your team, develop a team contract that lays out the team’s agreed-on goals for the project, expectations of team members, and ground rules for how decisions will be made and conflicts resolved. Complete the contract template, have all team members sign it, and submit the signed contract to LEARN under the “Team Contract” Dropbox.
Here is a contract template. Under the contract’s respective headings, include team-negotiated answers to all of the following questions:
- Team Goals: What does each member of the team want to get out of working on this project? Is everyone here to accomplish the same thing? What are your goals as a team collectively?
- Team Communications: How will you communicate? What are your expectations regarding the timeliness of responses to emails / MSTeams messages?
- Team Roles: Who will be the team leader for each of the 6 leadership periods? (See the Project→Teamwork Web page for more information about the Team Leader role that rotates among team members) What other team roles do you think are necessary for success of your project? (See the “Teamwork” lecture video/slides for possible team roles) Who will be assigned which team role? Will team roles rotate (e.g., as the leadership role rotates) or be fixed. Consider each team member’s strengths and weaknesses, their desires to capitalize on their strengths, and their desires to learn and improve on their weaknesses.
- Meeting Preparation: What do you expect team members to do prior to each weekly team meeting?
- Teamwork Assignments: How are you going to structure the work each week? Do you expect to do most of the work during or outside of the weekly team meeting? What process will you use to assign responsibilities to teammembers? How will you accommodate teammates’ time commitments outside of this class? (Consider regular commitments, workload in other courses, ad hoc commitments)
- Team Coordination: What are your expectations around the attitude of team members in the weekly meeting, and how you should respond to each other’s ideas? How will you manage turn-taking? How will you ensure that all teammembers contribute to the conversations? How will you ensure that decision making is thorough yet expedient?
- Team Deliverables: Who will be responsible for ensuring that team deliverables are submitted on time? Do you expect all members of the team to have a chance to vet the submission before it goes out? When should the writeup be ready for everyone to review?
- Surprises: How will you deal with surprises? What should individual do when he/she has a hard time delivering on something they promised either because it was harder than expected or because of an unexpected life/workload event? How will the team respond?
- Conflicts: How will you handle conflict? If any member on the team feels that something is not going right on the team, how would they signal it? How will the team respond?
- Masks: What is your team policy with respect to wearing masks during team meetings?
Grading Scheme: The contract is graded 0 or 1 based on completeness (i.e., all the required information is provided and nothing is missing, including signatures).
5. Create a Lean Canvas Model
Identify one or two customer/user segments to which you want to target your project. This group(s) should best represent the early adopters of your project. Create a Lean Canvas business model for that customer segment. Here are blank Lean Canvas templates in PDF and MS Word formats. (LucidChart, which is the modelling tool we are recommending this term, also as an online Lean Canvas template that you can use. See Resources→Tools for details about LucidChart.) We provide the full Lean Canvas model, so that you see what it looks like, but for this deliverable we ask you to complete only the top seven fields (you can ignore Cost and Revenue). I strongly recommend that each team member create their own Lean Canvas model, and then have the team collaborate on a joint Lean Canvas. Submit only the final Lean Canvas created jointly by the team.
Provide also a one-page Supplement (two pages max) to your Lean Canvas model that provides descriptions of (1) the customer/user segment(s), (2) their key problems, (3) the elements of your solution that address these problems, (4) the unique value propositions explaining how your proposed solution is better than existing approaches, and (5) the metrics you plan to track for measuring success. The purpose of the supplement is to help the TAs understand your project and the motivation behind it. (Think of the Supplement as the verbal explanation you would give to someone if you were presenting your model to them.) Include your answer to this part of the deliverable in a PDF file named «TeamName»_D2.pdf and submit it to LEARN.
Here is an example Lean Canvas Model for the Modern Family project, which helps busy Canadian families stay connected and coordinate the timing of activities or sharing of resources while minimizing conflicts.
Grading Scheme: This deliverable will be marked on the basis of (1) the Completeness, Clarity, and Relevance of your Lean Canvas model (i.e., your canvas should be clear and understandable without the supplemental descriptions, to help ensure that the team members’ understanding of the project are aligned and to help communicate the project goals to others), and (2) the Completeness, Clarity, and Relevance of your supplemental descriptions. See the Week 2 Rubric for details.
6. Problem-Fit Hypothesis Questions
Most of the information in your Lean Canvas are hypotheses about your proposed project. Identify five (5) hypotheses in your Lean Canvas that reflect the riskiest parts of your plan regarding
- your target customer segments (who are your early adoptors? do they care about the identified problems?)
- the customers’ problems (what are their most significant problems? how important are they?)
- your competition (how do your target customers solve their problems now? is their current solution good enough?)
For each hypothesis, construct a pass/fail test (falsifiable hypothesis) that will be used in future Problem-Fit Interviews. Include your answer (five Lean Canvas hypotheses, and five corresponding Problem-Fit Questions a set of questions for each hypothesis) in the PDF file named «TeamName»_D2.pdf and submit it via LEARN.
Here is are example Problem-Fit Hypotheses and Questions for the Modern Family project. Interviews and analysis of interview results are NOT due until Monday, Feb 2. For now, focus on the hypotheses you want to test and on how to ask unbiased scientific questions that get to the heart of your hypotheses.
Grading Scheme: This deliverable comprises only the Lean Canvas hypotheses and the corresponding Problem-Fit Interview questions. It will be marked on the basis of whether (1) your problem-fit questions cover your hypotheses about customer segments and their problems, and (2) the degree to which your pass/fail tests are falsifiable (i.e., designed to test rather than confirm your hypotheses). See the Week 2 Rubric for details.
Due Next Monday (Jan 19, 8:59pm ET)
Every team: