(2024-02-16) Maurya Coaching Lean Meta-Skills

Ash Maurya on Lean Startup Coaching Meta-Skills: Welcome to Coaching Lean Meta-skills

Has This All Been Just a Huge Waste of Time?
That question ran through my mind in the summer of 2012. I had just hung up the phone with a startup team recently attending one of my multi-day workshops

find that even though they still positively referenced many of the key takeaways from the workshop, they were hardly applying any of them.

many teams cherry-picked the easiest tactics — ones that often didn’t align with what was riskiest in their business models. Other teams had started running experiments with the best of intentions but then got stuck or discouraged after just a few failed experiments.

The challenge for adoption wasn’t just motivation but overcoming old habits and new anxieties.

*Once I understood this, I focused on studying the root causes of founder anxieties and explored techniques for overcoming old habits and establishing new ones.

The result is a set of coaching lean meta-skills I have used repeatedly over the last decade*

Welcome to the Coaching Lean Meta-skills course

This course will specifically focus on getting early-stage teams to adopt the continuous innovation framework described in my best-selling book, Running Lean.

Here are the key continuous innovation mindsets I aim to instill in teams:

MODEL
MINDSET #1: Your business model is the product.
MINDSET #2: Love the problem, not your solution.
MINDSET #3: Traction is the goal.

PRIORITIZE
MINDSET #4: Right action, right time.
MINDSET #5: Tackle your riskiest assumptions in stages.
MINDSET #6: Constraints are a gift.
MINDSET #7: Hold yourself externally accountable.

TEST
MINDSET #8: Place many small bets.
MINDSET #9: Make evidence-based decisions.
MINDSET #10: Breakthrough requires unexpected outcomes.

This course is best suited for startup mentors, educators, innovation coaches, and product managers leading teams through the fog of uncertainty that veils the early stages of any product.

Coaching Lean Meta-skill #1: Focus on Asking the Right Questions Versus Being Right

Several years ago, I was delivering a full-day workshop at a well-known startup accelerator. During lunch, the organizers had inserted a speed-mentoring session where teams sought advice in a 5-minute round-robin exchange

When we resumed the workshop, I asked the teams about the advice they had received. While they were appreciative, most were paralyzed by what to do next. They all had pages full of tactical how-to advice from their sessions. Their problem now was prioritizing which advice to follow — especially since much of the advice they had received directly contradicted each other.

When I pressed them to choose, most founders cherry-picked the advice that was easiest to implement AND aligned with their thinking. The problem with that is what’s riskiest in a business model usually isn’t what’s easiest or obvious.

That’s when I realized that advising and coaching are very different things.

a coach is someone trained to guide a team through the fog of uncertainty that envelopes the early stages of any product.

Over the next several lessons, I’ll lay out 10 meta-skills that distinguish coaching from advising. But the biggest distinction by far is the first:

Meta-skill #1: Focus on asking the right questions versus being right.

Incorrect prioritization of risk is one of the top killers of startups.

Many teams (and advisors) guess what’s riskiest, but the stakes are simply too high to get this wrong.

The best way to uncover what’s riskiest is through discovery. It starts with asking the right questions

Getting to what’s riskiest takes more than a 5-minute conversation, which is why the speed-mentoring sessions above were already set up for failure.

Sure, there is a place for advisers at the early stage — to help startups tactically implement the right action once they’ve been identified, but not before.

You start with your primary care physician. They diagnose you and, if warranted, refer you to a specialist.

Coaching Lean Meta-skill #2: Discover How Teams Think

Lesson 2 of 11: The Innovator’s Bias is Immune to Lecture

Building on lesson 1, the best way to uncover what’s riskiest in a business model is by asking the team the right questions before giving answers — diagnosis before prescription.

Your assessment of what’s riskiest will likely differ from theirs. But you can’t simply expect them to stop what they are doing and follow your advice because the Innovator’s Bias is immune to lecture. Getting a team to see what you see first requires discovering how they think.

1. Use standard models to baseline teams

There are three standard models I use:

I. Lean Canvas
A 1-page model to capture the key beliefs that make up the business model story.

II. Customer Factory
A 5 macro-metrics model to capture the key metrics and milestones that help baseline how a business model performs.

III. Customer Forces
A customer behavioral model to capture the key insights or secrets that explain how to grow the business model.

2. Fill in the gaps through a conversation

A critical aspect that neither of the models above directly address is the team.

Good teams quickly shed off bad business models for good ones, while bad teams hang on to bad business models for too long or fumble good ones.

3. Study their chain of beliefs

mentally rank their beliefs into three buckets: leaps of faith, anecdotal evidence, and empirical evidence.

Coaching Lean Meta-skill #3: Expose the One Constraint

The Key to Right Action, Right Time

The best way to harness a team’s full potential is by getting them to collectively focus on their one constraint or weakest link that unlocks growth.

“In any system, there is always a single limiting constraint.” Eli Goldratt, Theory of Constraints

startup problems often require non-obvious solutions. So, more hands on deck is actually a good thing — creating a diversity of possible solutions that maximizes the odds of breaking through a constraint

But you have to tread carefully. Too many entrepreneurs already think they know what’s riskiest. So do their advisors and investors. The problem is that they are often at odds with each other.

You need an objective way (absent opinions) to expose the one (indisputable) constraint

apply systems thinking to expose the constraint

Growth in a startup = Traction = More customers.

The universal goal then of any startup is to create more happy customers

systems diagram of the pirate metrics (AARRR) shown below:

exposing the one constraint is a 3 step process:

1. Traction = Customer Throughput

2. Baseline current throughput

3. Identify the slowest step (bottleneck

Walk the customer factory backward to identify the slowest step. This is the limiting or constraining step.

I prefer to frame this as a propelling question. I’ll pick up on that next time

Coaching Lean Meta-skill #4: Formulate a Validation Strategy

Triggering Behavior Change

many constraints feel like a Catch 22 — obvious to see, but hard to break.

The critical next step is asking a propelling question that takes additional resources off the table:

Follow the propelling question with a validation strategy, ideally with a real world example

Where do you find these examples?

By becoming a student of validation patterns.

I’ve been cataloging early stage patterns, recipes, and tactics for over a decade which I now teach in my Coaching Lean workshops.

Coaching Lean Meta-skill #5: Balance Needs and Wants

Teams will either see what you see and be excitedly onboard or not yet be convinced.

If the former, you can jump ahead to next meta-skill where you help them break the high-level validation strategy into an immediate next action.

What do you do if they don’t see what you see?

Building a new product out of nothing requires strong founder conviction. However, left unchecked, the journey can quickly turn into a faith-based one driven by dogma.

Think Judo versus Sumo

Focus on what they want versus what I think they need.

Turn their want into a time-boxed and measurable goal.

One of two things inevitably happens.

Either their gut instincts were right, and they achieve the goal

Or, they encounter an unexpected obstacle that makes them stumble and fall. This creates a triggering event to explore the obstacle together and do what’s needed to remove it.

Scenario 1: Founder is adamant they know the problem space and don’t need to run customer interviews. They just want to finish their MVP.

Reframe the conversation around building a waiting list of prospects so they’ll have a pipeline of customers waiting once their product is ready.
Get them to go faster by packaging what they have into an offer (UVP + demo + Call-to-action) and pitching it.

Scenario 2: Founder wants to raise funding but has no meaningful traction

Help them go faster by sharing the Business Model Story pitch template with some examples.
It shouldn’t take long for them to realize they can’t pitch their traction roadmap.

Scenario 3: Founder wants help with scaling, but you don’t think they have product/market fit.
point them to the Traction Roadmap tool and offer a follow-up review.
Once they plot their current metrics on their traction roadmap, they baseline themselves, and the conversation becomes much more productive

Coaching Lean Meta-skill #6: Right Action, Right Time

The last two lessons culminate to the same objective: Getting the team to focus on a single next action to break their single limiting constraint (right action, right time).

You should strive to end every coaching session with a single “right action, right time” call-to-action. This is particularly critical in your very first coaching session because it serves as the first reward loop toward behavior change.

I first learned about the habit loop in Charles Duhigg’s groundbreaking book: The Power of Habit

The habit loop, while simple, leads to some pretty interesting applications beyond classical conditioning.

Did you know that brushing your teeth wasn’t a daily habit until the 1940s?

It took a marketer at the toothpaste brand Peposodent, Claude Hopkins, to change all that.

he introduced an intermediate reward. He had his chemists add mint and citric acid to the toothpaste, which created a cooling and tingling sensation that none of the other kinds of toothpaste had. This was different and provided an immediate (albeit temporary) reward of slightly better breath.

Takeaway 1 of 3: A positive reward is critical to reinforce the action.

Prescriptive lecture-driven advice doesn’t qualify as a reward because this kind of advice typically goes nowhere.

Getting the team to a “right action, right time” aha-moment is the first reward. It’s a reward because early-stage teams typically have a dozen or more high-priority to-dos competing for their attention. Simply getting them to focus on the one thing that matters is intrinsically rewarding.

Aim to secure team commitment around “right action, right time.” This is a critical first step but not enough to make the habit stick.

Coaching Lean Meta-skill #7: Establish a Cadence

The LEAN Sprint

In my first few bootcamps, I followed all the steps I’ve outlined thus far

Then I’d never hear back from the team.

trap many teams fall into: Playing success theater

They’d rather deliver good versus bad news and when faced with the latter (more common with initial experiments), they kick the can further down the road in the hopes that things will get better with time. They usually don’t.

You know what comes next. They revert back to their old ways.

The answer to this challenge also comes from an application of the habit loop.

Takeaway 2 of 3: A recurring trigger (or prompt) is critical to make a habit stick.

Having a great first coaching session isn’t enough to make the habit loop stick. Why? Because turning a one-time behavior into a habit requires repetition

How do you get people to repeat an action? With prompts or recurring triggers.

The simple fix: Create a recurring triggering event through time-boxing.

secure commitment for a series of follow-up sessions so we can see the campaign through.

My ideal coaching engagement is 90 days, broken into six 2-week sprints. This 90-day cycle is long enough to drive meaningful traction, and the 2-week sprints are short enough to drive meaningful accountability.

Coaching Lean Meta-skill #8: Stack Reward Loops

We’ve seen that incorporating rewards at the end of a routine is a powerful “habit hack.” Initially, these rewards tend to be smaller, like delivering minty freshness when brushing your teeth, but their purpose is signaling that you’re on the right track toward achieving a bigger goal.

That brings us to the third and final takeaway:

Making progress is the ultimate reward.

it needs to change the person’s identity intrinsically. It’s the difference between saying, “I run to stay fit,” and “I’m a runner.”

Getting there requires a progressive stacking of rewards that reinforce that identity.

When designing for behavior change, it helps to visualize the identity you’re aiming to create along with measurable indicators.

Traction is the output of a working business model and the ultimate reward. But as in the case of brushing, it takes a series of steps.

D.I.E.T is a mnemonic I devised to capture the four stages of rewards:

Discovery: gets founders to put the spotlight on their single limiting constraint. You ideally want to accomplish this in your first session. The reward here is “right action, right time.”

Insights: The goal of discovery is to uncover insights. By definition, insights are new pieces of evidence-based facts that help explain why customers behave the way they do.

Experiment: Good open-ended discovery should generate many insights, but not all insights are equal. The next step is helping teams objectively rank, prioritize, and test these insights with a small and fast experiment (runnable in less than two weeks).

Traction: If the insight was good, the experiment should result in measurable traction.

Coaching Lean Meta-skill #9: Tough Love

3 Principles for Becoming a Trusted Coach

Steve Jobs may have arguably been the least-coachable founder. Yet he had a coach - Bill Campbell, who started coaching him in 1997

Bill Campbell, a former college football player and coach, also coached Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichal, and Sheryl Sandberg, earning him the title Trillion Dollar Coach. How did he manage to get into the inner circle of so many Silicon Valley powerhouses? The answer: Earned trust.

Earned trust is a key catalyst for transformation.

Today, I’ll outline three key principles that have repeatedly enabled me to earn the trust of even the most challenging founders.

1. Active Listening

All my sessions begin with a 5-minute progress update where I don’t speak unless to ask a clarifying question.

2. Radical Honesty

When confronted with challenging business model problems, offering opinions and solutions is easy. It’s much harder to admit you don’t know.

Admit there isn’t enough information to make a sound decision. Rather than rush to a/b testing weak guesses, advocate for problem discovery, Then facilitate the sourcing, ranking, and prioritization of possible solutions once the problem is better understood.

Radical honesty also requires knowing when to call a founder’s bullshit, holding them accountable (to their own success metrics), and having tough pivot and pause conversations.

This is what I mean by tough love.

The reward loops I outlined last time require doing (actions). If there is no doing, there can be no reward.

3. Faith in Founders

It requires believing in people more than they believe in themselves.

Coaching Lean: Meta-skill #10: Invest in Team Learning

The Socratic Method

Building a good team requires investing in team learning, which is probably the hardest meta-skill to develop because it requires patience, empathy, humility, and discipline.

Patience: giving your teams space for learning and self-discovery. Even when a risk or solution is obvious, I opt for a modeling exercise or experiment step to reveal it.

Empathy: We have to constantly remember that we are asking teams to learn new skills they have never done before, like talking to customers and selling a product before it’s built. Not only is this new to them, but it makes them uncomfortable and even afraid.

Humility: If I could tell good ideas from bad ideas by reviewing a Lean Canvas, I wouldn’t be coaching them but running a Unicorn factory. You must be comfortable saying, “I don’t know, but I can show you how to answer that question….”, which brings us to the final pillar.

Discipline: You have to lead by example. Consistency and repetition are key to transformation