Lean Impact

Despite enormous investments of time and money, are we making a dent on the social and environmental challenges of our time? What if we could exponentially increase our impact? Around the world, a new generation is looking beyond greater profits, for meaningful purpose. But, unlike business, few social interventions have achieved significant impact at scale. Inspired by the modern innovation practices, popularized by bestseller The Lean Startup, that have fueled technology breakthroughs touching every aspect of our lives, Lean Impact turns our attention to a new goal - radically greater social good. Social change is far more complicated than building a new app. It requires more listening, more care, and more stakeholders. To make a lasting difference, solutions must be embraced by beneficiaries, address root causes, and include an engine that can accelerate growth to reach the scale of the need. Lean Impact offers bold ideas to reach audacious goals through customer insight, rapid experimentation and iteration, and a relentless pursuit of impact. Ann Mei Chang brings a unique perspective from across sectors, from her years as a tech executive in Silicon Valley to her most recent experience as the Chief Innovation Officer at USAID. She vividly illustrates the book with real stories from interviews with over 200 organizations across the US and around the world. Whether you are a nonprofit, social enterprise, triple bottom line company, foundation, government agency, philanthropist, impact investor, or simply donate your time and money, Lean Impact is an essential guide to maximizing social impact and scale.

For years, the lean startup has been revolutionizing both new and established businesses. In this eye-opening book, serial social entrepreneur Michel Gelobter shows how it can do the same for nonprofits. Traditionally, whether creating a new business or a new program, entrepreneurs in all sectors develop a plan, find money to fund it, and pursue it to its conclusion. The problem is, over time conditions can change drastically—but you're locked into your plan. The lean startup is all about agility and flexibility. Its mantra is “build, measure, learn”: create small experimental initiatives, quickly get real-world feedback on them, and use that data to expand what works and discard what doesn't. Using dozens of social sector examples, Gelobter walks you through the process. The standard approach wastes time and money. The lean startup will help your organization vastly increase the good it does.

This book fundamentally challenges the way in which PhDs are currently pursued. It applies lean methodologies – which have been embraced by start-ups – to the doctoral research process. It explains how to apply techniques such as the minimal viable product (MVP) approach, rapid prototyping and pivoting to each stage, from choosing a topic to seeking feedback, in order to save time, make the process more efficient and demonstrate impact. Chapters are enriched with insights from PhD researchers, practical guidance on going lean and a wealth of empirical data which supports this new approach to postgraduate research. This inspiring text is a must-read for prospective and current PhD students who wish to accelerate their careers in academia and beyond.

Scaling Impact introduces a new and practical approach to scaling the positive impacts of research and innovation. Inspired by leading scientific and entrepreneurial innovators from across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East, this book presents a synthesis of unrivalled diversity and grounded ingenuity. The result is a different perspective on how to achieve impact that matters, and an important challenge to the predominant more-is-better paradigm of scaling. For organisations and individuals working to change the world for the better, scaling impact is a common goal and a well-founded aim. The world is changing rapidly, and seemingly intractable problems like environmental degradation or accelerating inequality press us to do better for each other and our environment as a global community. Challenges like these appear to demand a significant scale of action, and here the authors argue that a more creative and critical approach to scaling is both possible and essential. To encourage uptake and co-development, the authors present actionable principles that can help organisations and innovators design, manage, and evaluate scaling strategies. Scaling Impact is essential reading for development and innovation practitioners and professionals, but also for researchers, students, evaluators, and policymakers with a desire to spark meaningful change.

The #1 international best seller In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg reignited the conversation around women in the workplace. Sandberg is chief operating officer of Facebook and coauthor of Option B with Adam Grant. In 2010, she gave an electrifying TED talk in which she described how women unintentionally hold themselves back in their careers. Her talk, which has been viewed more than six million times, encouraged women to “sit at the table,” seek challenges, take risks, and pursue their goals with gusto. Lean In continues that conversation, combining personal anecdotes, hard data, and compelling research to change the conversation from what women can’t do to what they can. Sandberg provides practical advice on negotiation techniques, mentorship, and building a satisfying career. She describes specific steps women can take to combine professional achievement with personal fulfillment, and demonstrates how men can benefit by supporting women both in the workplace and at home. Written with humor and wisdom, Lean In is a revelatory, inspiring call to action and a blueprint for individual growth that will empower women around the world to achieve their full potential.

A guide to product management exploring the best practices: identifying the impact-driven product, planning for success, setting up and measuring time-bound metrics, and developing a lean product roadmap. Key Features Identifying Impact-Driven Products Investing in Key Business Outcomes Value mapping to maintain a lean product backlog Utilizing time-bound product metrics Eliminating process waste Book Description Lean Product Management is about finding the smartest way to build an Impact Driven Product that can deliver value to customers and meet business outcomes when operating under internal and external constraints. Author, Mangalam Nandakumar, is a product management expert, with over 17 years of experience in the field. Businesses today are competing to innovate. Cost is no longer the constraint, execution is. It is essential for any business to harness whatever competitive advantage they can, and it is absolutely vital to deliver the best customer experience possible. The opportunities for creating impact are there, but product managers have to improvise on their strategy every day in order to capitalize on them. This is the Agile battleground, where you need to stay Lean and be able to respond to abstract feedback from an ever shifting market. This is where Lean Product Management will help you thrive. Lean Product Management is an essential guide for product managers, and to anyone embarking on a new product development. Mangalam Nandakumar will help you to align your product strategy with business outcomes and customer impact. She introduces the concept of investing in Key Business Outcomes as part of the product strategy in order to provide an objective metric about which product idea and strategy to pursue. You will learn how to create impactful end-to-end product experiences by engaging stakeholders and reacting to external feedback. What you will learn How do you execute ideas that matter? How can you define the right success metrics? How can you plan for product success? How do you capture qualitative and quantitative insights about the product? How do you know whether your product aligns to desired business goals? What processes are slowing you down? Who this book is for If you are leading a team that is building a new product, then this book is for you. The book is targeted at product managers, functional leads in enterprises, business sponsors venturing into new product offerings, product development teams, and start-up founders.

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

How well does your organization respond to changing market conditions, customer needs, and emerging technologies when building software-based products? This practical guide presents Lean and Agile principles and patterns to help you move fast at scale—and demonstrates why and how to apply these paradigms throughout your organization, rather than with just one department or team. Through case studies, you’ll learn how successful enterprises have rethought everything from governance and financial management to systems architecture and organizational culture in the pursuit of radically improved performance. Discover how Lean focuses on people and teamwork at every level, in contrast to traditional management practices Approach problem-solving experimentally by exploring solutions, testing assumptions, and getting feedback from real users Lead and manage large-scale programs in a way that empowers employees, increases the speed and quality of delivery, and lowers costs Learn how to implement ideas from the DevOps and Lean Startup movements even in complex, regulated environments