Agile, Architecture and Customer Development

Lessons Learned: Customer Development Engineering

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Ive attempted to embed the relevant slides below.

Customer Development

Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer

Startup Suicide – Rewriting the Code

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2011

The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. But over time if developers aren’t careful, code written to find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling.

Part-Time VPE

Part-Time VPE Agile Engineer Startup

[Review] The Lean Startup

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Such direct experiences allows one to test critical “leap-of-faith” assumptions about what customers like and dislike. Customer development (the understanding of customer needs) must be married to agile development (a process which drives waste out of product development).

Lean

Lean Technical Review North America Startup

Lean Meets Wicked Problems

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2023

This meant the class was team-based, Lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering) and experiential – where the students, rather than being presented with all of the essential information, must discover that information rapidly for themselves.

Lean

Lean Chile Ukraine Spain

Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? That means knowing whats written and whats not, what the architecture can and cant support, and how long it would take to build something new. Labels: product development 15comments: mukund said.

CTO

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review

Lessons Learned: Just-In-Time Scalability

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean

The curse of prevention

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

It’s important to invest in good architecture so that your website will scale once customers arrive. If you make that investment, and then customers arrive, and the site stays up, most companies will reward the people who built the architecture and, thus, prevented the scaling problems.

San Francisco

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment

Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

I hope to show why lean and agile techniques actually reduce the negative impacts of technical debt and increase our ability to take advantage of its positive effects. Just as a business incurs some debt to take advantage of a market opportunity developers may incur technical debt to hit an important deadline.

Technical Review

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean

Intel Disrupted: Why large companies find it difficult to innovate, and what they can do about it

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

ARM, a competitor, not only had a better, much lower power processor, but a better business model – they licensed their architecture to other companies that designed their own products. Today that’s built on the premise that an x86 architecture is the one best suited for big data. Startups are unencumbered by the status quo.

Architecture

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event

Convergent Technologies: War Story 1 – Selling with Sports Scores.

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

He complemented their elegantly designed minicomputers and made some astute comment about their architecture (now I’m rolling my eyes, their computers were dinosaurs) and asked who were the brilliant designers. The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on?

Technology

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE

The Principles of Product Development Flow

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of Product Development Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen is the book for you. Expo SF (May.

Product Development

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product

Lessons Learned: The ABCDEF's of conducting a technical interview

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

The six key attributes spell ABCDEF: Agility. When talking about their past experience, candidates with agility will know why they did what they did in a given situation. To probe for agility, you have to ask the candidate questions involving something that they know little about. At the time, I was a die-heard Java zealot.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Agile Java

Lessons Learned: Five Whys

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Wed never heard of five whys, and we had plenty of "agile skeptics" on the team. It seems your cluster architecture is one of the key architectural constraints making continuous deployment possible. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May.

Software Review

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment

Lessons Learned: The engineering manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

As I evolved my thinking, I started to frame the problem this way: How can we devise a product development process that allows the business leaders to take responsibility for the outcome by making conscious trade-offs? When I first encountered agile software techniques, in the form of extreme programming , I thought I had found the answer.

Software Review

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review

Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, January 4, 2009 Sharding for startups The most important aspect of a scalable web architecture is data partitioning. So far, this is just a summary of what all of us who have attempted to build web-scale architectures considers obvious. Customer data is normally partitioned according to customer id.

San Francisco

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database

Vision versus Hallucination – Founders and Pivots

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. It seemed like once a week Yuri would come back from a customer meeting brimming with new insights. Filed under: Customer Development.

Founder

Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate

Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

I know them right away - we can talk high-level architecture all the way down to the bits-and-bytes of his system. When the architecture needs modifying - why do we need a meeting? Building a good application architecture is not just coding. Its common to find a hacker at the heart of almost any successful technology company.

Software Review

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Part-Time VPE

No departments

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

I suggested that we change the underlying architecture of our UI system so that the artists would be able to build their own UI pieces themselves and then integrate them into the product without requiring new code every time. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ▼ June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May.

Technical Review

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review

Waves of technology platforms

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

You dont need to invent a new architecture, and you dont need to even build your architecture up-front. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Were in a new wave of platform evolution. 1 comments: flixsterwidgettest said. yeah, its awesome. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco

San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean

Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and what's changed since.

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

And as Kapor himself points out, the core ideas have even older origins: The Roman architecture critic Vitruvius advanced the notion that well-designed buildings were those which exhibited firmness, commodity, and delight. Customer Development is itself an example of SBCE. We owe a lot to this seminal document. Expo SF (May.

Software Review

Software Review Design Software San Francisco

The Mission Model Canvas – An Adapted Business Model Canvas for Mission-Driven Organizations

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

As a formal method, the Lean Startup consists of three parts: The Business Model Canvas – to frame hypotheses, Customer Development – to test those hypotheses in front of customers, and Agile Engineering – to build Minimum Viable Products to maximize learning. Change Customer Relationships to Buy-in/Support.

Business Model

Business Model Revenue Channel Community

Continuous deployment for mission-critical applications

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Switching these customers directly to continuous deployment sounds harder than it really is. A typical "new feature" release is, in my experience, about 80% changes to underlying APIs or architecture. Continuous deployment offers three significant advantages over large batch development systems. I just dont believe it.

Continuous Deployment

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics

Why Continuous Deployment?

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Both sides start to think of their point of view in moralistic terms: “those guys don’t see the economic value of fast action, they only care about their precious architecture diagrams&# or “those guys are sloppy and have no professional pride.&# No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

Continuous Deployment

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean

Thoughts on scientific product development

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Someone has managed to convince themselves that they have to do their big architecture change in one fell swoop. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? When Ive worked to get everyone to build in small batches, I would see this pattern in action. Expo SF (May.

Product Development

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product

Continuous deployment with downloads

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

Lets start with a distinction between shipping new software to the customer, and changing the customers experience. The idea is that often you can change the customers experience without shipping them new software at all. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Continuous Deployment

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean

Lessons Learned: Product development leverage

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Open APIs and data-oriented architecture (aka "web 2.0"). The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Product development leverage Validated learning about customers Built to learn Web 2.0 The much-promised era of component reuse in software is finally upon us.

Product Development

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product

What would you want to tell Washington DC about startups?

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

I started my last company with 100% off-shore resources because I could never have completed Customer Development at a reasonable cost of money or regulatory burden had I employed US Citizens. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May.

DC

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR

Product design debt versus Technical debt

andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

Coupled with A/B testing, customer development, and thinking through business problems in a scientific, hypothesis-driven way, you end up with a powerful cocktail of techniques to build a modern startup in the most iterative way possible. If you liked this post, please subscribe or follow me on Twitter. what a coincidence.

Technical Review

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product

Lessons Learned: Achieving a failure

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Even though some aspects of the product were eventually vindicated as good ones, the underlying architecture suffered from hard-to-change assumptions. Without conscious process design, product development teams turn lines of code written into momentum in a certain direction. Even a great architecture becomes inflexible.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment

Lessons Learned: Refactoring yourself out of business

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

The engineering team has decided its reached a breaking point, and is taking several weeks to bring it up to modern standards, including unit tests, getting started with continuous integration , and a new MVC architecture. On the other, they already have a team fully engaged on making their product architecture better. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC

StartUpRoar

Lessons Learned: Customer Development Engineering

Startup Suicide – Rewriting the Code

Trending Sources

[Review] The Lean Startup

Lean Meets Wicked Problems

Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Lessons Learned: Just-In-Time Scalability

The curse of prevention

Embrace technical debt

Intel Disrupted: Why large companies find it difficult to innovate, and what they can do about it

Convergent Technologies: War Story 1 – Selling with Sports Scores.

The Principles of Product Development Flow

Lessons Learned: The ABCDEF's of conducting a technical interview

Lessons Learned: Five Whys

Lessons Learned: The engineering manager's lament

Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups

Vision versus Hallucination – Founders and Pivots

Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

No departments

Waves of technology platforms

Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and what's changed since.

The Mission Model Canvas – An Adapted Business Model Canvas for Mission-Driven Organizations

Continuous deployment for mission-critical applications

Why Continuous Deployment?

Thoughts on scientific product development

Continuous deployment with downloads

Lessons Learned: Product development leverage

What would you want to tell Washington DC about startups?

Product design debt versus Technical debt

Lessons Learned: Achieving a failure

Lessons Learned: Refactoring yourself out of business

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