Meetup Thursday 10th March with Laura Baines and Ranjit Das
We’ve been quiet for a while but still been busy. Tech North have come on board and we’ve two fantastic speakers lined up to kick off 2016. There’s lots going on around the region in the startup space including Leanconf 2016 about to happen and Future Labs opening soon. Make sure you come along to catch up and learning something at the same time.
Laura Baines: 2 Startups, 3 Years, Many Lessons
Laura embarked on her startup journey in March 2013 when she formed Flowify, a hospitality technology company. Flowify raised multiple rounds of funding and was awarded as one of the Top 50 Creative Business in the UK by Creative England.
Despite many successes they never truly found product/market fit. After 2 years, for many reasons, the decision was made to shelve Flowify for a while and start a second company, onShowcase. Laura and the team used the many lessons learnt the first time to influence their decisions the second time around – taking a much more ‘lean’ approach.
Laura will be discussing the journey of Flowify, the lessons they learnt and how exactly they influenced the decisions made.
Bio:
Laura is founder of two technology companies; Flowify and onShowcase. Laura was part of the Dotforge Accelerator 2013, StartupBus 2014 and Dotforge Impact 2015. Laura’s latest venture, onShowcase, is a content curation platform for schools and organisations to manage their online brand image.
Ranjit Das: How GE are using the Lean Startup Approach
Eric Ries’ Lean Startup principles have been successfully integrated into GE’s ‘New Product Introduction’ process and have yielded dramatic results for GE.
All companies have a new product failure rate of 9 out of 10; GE was no different. By encorporating the five step approach outlined in “”The Lean Startup”” by Eric Ries, GE has been able to dramatically improve its New Product Launches by more quickly identifying the products that will fail before millions of dollars of R&D has been spent.
This session will briefly outline GE’s approach.
Bio:
I have worked for over twenty years in Learning & Talent Development; ten plus years with GE.
I support Entrepreneurs in start-up businesses. I have spent two years training and coaching over 1000 Engineers and Product Managers in GE on a tried-and-tested Start-up approach. My direct, pragmatic and action orientated coaching has supported many Product Managers in GE. I provide a challenging and supportive working partnership that leads to successful New Product Development and Start-ups.
