Today, top graduates are moving from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, upping the ante on innovation, and makers of simple smart phone apps are becoming billionaires overnight. Behind some of the greatest successes of our age – companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Dropbox – lies a sea of failure. You might think that all the great ideas are already out there; that success lies in a stroke of luck that rescues one company or another from a graveyard of ideas. Survival in today’s digital world, in other words, can seem impossibly arbitrary and complicated, but I would argue that success is actually very simple.

In this presentation, I will illustrate a fast, lean, and direct approach to creating insanely successful digital products and services. My discussion will span the process of innovation from its earliest stages through ongoing optimization: finding an idea, making a plan, building a team, coding, designing, and launch, which I believe is just the beginning of the creative process.