Lean Cloud Event, Sydney

With so many incredibly boring technology events in any technology professional’s calendar, this event from AWS and Lean Startup with Werner Vogels and Eric Ries was a really good one indeed. The key takeaways for me were the following.

1. AWS is enabling companies to employ a more “lean” or experimental approach to creating and releasing technology
2. AWS allows for startups to scale up for success in a completely elastic way, and also scale down, which is a key component of cloud.
3. Build your technology to be scalable by using small building blocks.
4. Lean is all about running intelligent experiments (yeah, read the book)
5. Validated learning. (read the book)
6. Minimal viable product (MVP – read the book)
7. Measure metrics that can be tied to levers that the company’s decisions and actions can affect.
8. While software development techniques such as agile are great for improving team’s ability to build the right software, lean startup takes the step up to the company strategy level and asks how to build the right company with the right product.

I really do believe that Eric Ries has written something extremely valuable for all entrepreneurs. I remember several times in my career working for startups having flashes of “why are we choosing the approach? it seems so arbitrary and such a guess. Surely we should validate this somehow” yet I never thought it right through to completion and I take my hat off to Mr Ries for having really investigated and invented an approach with such merit and thoroughness.