2. Blaise Emmanuel
Vignon Levi-Valensi
Startup guy @ Microsoft France Founder/GM People in Action
• Your contact for everything • Consultancy & agile web and
startup mobile development
Bizspark: Lean and agile practicioner:
• Software • Value driven
• Support • Innovation
• Visibility • User Experience
• And more • And more
@blaise_v @PIA_Emmanuel
• Or blaisev@microsoft.com • Or elv@pia-conseil.com

3. A sad statistic
Proportion of New Businesses
Founded in 1992 Still Alive By Year. Most startup failures are
due to running out of
money before having the
right product
There can be other causes
(WCR, founder shoutfest,
litigation)
Source : Illusions of Entrepreneurship But not in the context of this
Scott Shane (US Data, all industries) talk 

4. The following slides were built with
software engineering in mind
Software engineering is
• Highly creative
• Very interdependant on coworkers
• Loosely coupled
In short, it is like many other startup functions
• Marketing
• PR/Communication
• Business Development
• Product design
The learning from Software Engineering
have been applied to broader fields

5. The longer the project, the likelier the
failure

6. ….because it is the less clear what success
looks like …
60
% of project requirement changes
50
40
30
20
10
0
10 100 1000 10000 100000
Project size (measured in function points, yes, we know…)

7. … and noiіse levels can get out of
control…
Undefined
Anarchy
Requirements
Complex
Well defined
Cutting edge
Mature
Technology
(project environment in
general)

8. …but do we know why projects should be
big?
Only 20% of
features are used
often

9. … and designing the wrong thing is
easy…
(we do not always know what the customer will look like)

10. Project (and startup) management can be
like this

11. Inefficient way of working
The « break-down and specialize »
management method leads to many wastes:
Stock of useless functionalities, High cost of coordination
documentation and communication

12. Agility proposes a different management
paradiіgm…
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
Source: http://agilemanifesto.org/

13. Important Agile Principles
Customer
satisfaction Collective
is the main goal commitment
Measure to Intrinsic
objectivize quality

14. Agility proposes a different management
paradiіgm…

15. Agile way of delivering
The Scrum process

16. Fail fast, fail early
• As we are delivering fast, we can harvest
positive and negative feedbacks
• As we accept changes, we can take into
account these feedbacks and adapt our plans
• Feedback is more precious than perfection

17. Tips to accelerate failure (or success)
• Instead of building a full product or
service, prototype it
• There are several prototype types:
Mechanical turk Pinocchio The Provincial The Minimal
Viable Product

18. Agile Marketing
Imagine and
Generate demand
validate the MVP
Cu s t omer Cu s t omer Cu s t omer Company
dis c over y Val idat ion c r eat ion bu il ding
Validate market
Accelerate!
hypothesis

19. Some great books…
http://institut-agile.fr