Presented at Cleveland Lean Startup Circle. A brief how-to on Lean Coffee to set the stage for facilitating a Lean Coffee session. Lean Coffee is a format for meetings and always generates great dialog for those who participate. It’s really quite simple - there’s no agenda and everyone contributes topics they would like to discuss. We each vote on the topics that sound the most interesting and those with the most votes we bring into a light-weight Kanban board and start talking.

1. Nicole Capuana
01/14/2014
Productive
Conversations
with Lean
Coffee
Creative Commons License - Photo by jenny downing on Flickr

2. Welcome - we meet the 2nd
Tuesday of every month
February 2/11
Startup Weekend & Startup Bus - why you should go!
March 3/11
Learn & Practice the Design Studio Method
April 4/8
Looking for some UX love?
May 5/13
Intro to frameworks & designing with grids
June 6/10
Marketing and growth hacking for your startup when you
don’t have much money
July 7/8
What to do when you realize you need to pivot?
meetup.com/Cleveland-Lean-Startup-Circle/

3. What is Lean Coffee?
A simple and democratic way to discuss topics and have
conversations that people want to talk about.
It’s structured but agenda-less
Started in 2009 – Seattle
Jim Benson & Jeremy Lightsmith
Today – all over
http://leancoffee.org/
Creative Commons License - Photo by roger.karlsson on Flickr

4. How does it work?
• Set up Kanban
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1LslhSW5hWoj-qMf8Vh7JrfIKC0HUPhYjLBoacha8lAA/edit?pli=1
• Generate topics
• Review & Vote (2 votes a person)
• Tally & Talk

5. What do you need?
• Post-its
• Markers
• Timer

6. 8 minutes then vote
Thumb up - keep talking
Sideways - neutral
Thumb down – move on to next topic

7. Unconference
• Principles of Open Space
• Whoever comes are the right
people
• Whatever happens is the only
things that could have
• Whenever it starts is the right
time
• Whenever it's over it's over
• The law of 2 feet - if you are
neither learning or
contributing it is your
responsibility to respectfully
use your own 2 feet to find
some place you are learning
or contributing

8. It’s that
easy
Creative Commons License - Photo by benjaminasmith on Flickr