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The terms “CTO&# and “VP Engineering&# have such stigmas associated with what they are that I’m sure some people will feel uncomfortable with the definitions I’ve put forward. I hope many will read this and have an answer for the question, “what’s the different between a CTO and a VP of Engineering?&#.
I've done four Free CTO Consulting Sessions in the past month with startup founders who all had run into variations of the same problem. In the fourth case, the founder was getting ready to sign a very large contract, but they didn't feel they had much visibility into what was going to be delivered. They couldn't plan their business.
I did a presentation recently for a graduate class from The Founder Institute around getting online/mobile products out the door. I LOVED it because, the presenting part was over quickly and we got into specific issues that the founders had in terms of getting things built. Third party products are used appropriately.
Would you create contracts without an attorney? Specifically, they should know about, and help with: Asking and answering the 53 Questions Developers Should Ask Innovators Knowing when and how to bring on development talent ( Hiring Developers Before Product/Market Fit? , Strategy can be had on a part-time basis.
Investors my tell you that, but what they can look at your product on paper and tell what it does and they will understand if it can be built. Leverage Existing Platforms or Third Party Products - you want to test your social network, grab Drupal and whip something together, or even just use a hosted service.
So, here goes: Dr. Tony Karrer Over the past 15 years, Tony has been a part-timeCTO for more than 30 startups. Most notably, he was the original CTO for eHarmony for its first four years making him partly responsible for more than 4% of the marriages every year. Tony has a Ph.D. How do you know if you may have issues?
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 30, 2008 What does a startup CTO actually do? Often times, it seems like people are thinking its synonymous with "that guy who gets paid to sit in the corner and think technical deep thoughts" or "that guy who gets to swoop in a rearrange my project at the last minute on a whim."
they need a developer more than they need a CTO. As a founder, you do need to be telling the developers what the business and product goals are. I just had a fellow CTO ask me about a particular technical design problem and several directions they could go and ask for my thoughts on the tradeoffs for those different choices.
a New York-based sizzle reel production company specializing in promotional videos for PR and marketing professionals, and the Young Entrepreneur Council. Hiring the wrong person for key company positions can cost a business thousands — or tens of thousands — of dollars and man hours. Zach Cutler , The Cutler Group.
In this period (less than 2 years) he has brought on incredibly talented senior execs is sales, marketing, product management, client services, finance, vp engineering and more. In his spare time he raised nearly $30 million. The Agile Board. Oh, and did I mention – Rob is in SF and Nick is in the UK. Board Meetings.
Twenty-five years ago, to go public you had to sell stuff – not just acquire users or have freemium products. People had to actually pay you for your product. This required a repeatable and scalable sales process, which required a professional sales staff and a product stable enough that customers wouldn’t return it.
Want to Know Difference Between a CTO and a VP of Engineering? The terms “CTO” and “VP Engineering” have such stigmas associated with what they are that I’m sure some people will feel uncomfortable with the definitions I’ve put forward. I’ve heard both arguments from CTO’s.
They’re still built that way by the product’s engineers. They hire a team, spend months planning, their engineers build it, and… the final product isn’t quite right. To go back to the drawing board would require time and money most small businesses can’t afford. How no-code tools work.
But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. So far, I have found "lean startup" works better with the entrepreneurs Ive talked to than "agile startup" or even "extreme startup.") Of course, many startups are capital efficient and generally frugal.
Starting around 2004 and 2005 I began seeing an increasing number of teams moving to Agile, and of course the first thing they needed was training and often some coaching. I thought - incorrectly it turns out - that this would be a temporary issue, while the Agile community gained experience, especially with commercial product companies.
Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content.
In addition to presenting the IMVU case, we tried for the first time to do an overview of a software engineering methodology that integrates practices from agile software development with Steves method of Customer Development. What about a hardware business with some long-lead-time components?
The result is a combination of design thinking, Lean Startup, and Agile Scrum, and Ignacio’s innovation team includes 25 coaches who train employees in PACE best practices. LESSON #3: Avoid these three hiring mistakes. When it comes time to grow your team, Jeff Jordan and Eric pointed out three hiring mistakes to avoid.
In a few cases, they are clearly smart people in a bad situation, and Ive written about their pain in The product managers lament and The engineering managers lament. And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Just change it. All is not lost, though.
And you will want to make sure you see what the particular designers have done, samples of their work product, their process, etc. You are looking for someone who cares about the look, but you are hiring the development firm for it''s development skills not its graphic design skills. Some of what I have below applies.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 2, 2008 Just-In-Time Scalability At my previous company, we pioneered an approach to building out our infrastructure that we called "Just-In-Time Scalability." You can also download our presentation, " Just-In-Time Scalability: Agile Methods to Support Massive Growth."
I am convinced one of Joel Spolskys lasting contributions to the field of managing software teams will turn out to be the Joel Test , a checklist of 12 essential practices that you could use to rate the effectiveness of a software product development team. are the parts of the Joel Test I think are most out-of-date. Youd better.
I have covered a couple of topics in this series, the first being hiring the best people and the second organizing for success based on the attributes of the people you are hiring. 3) It all starts with the product: Companies can overcome a great many challenges with band-aids, duct tape, and bailing wire.
It’s common, perhaps the norm, for startups to pivot like that—to discover that a product is catching on in unintended ways worth pursuing. Yet there’s a lot of mystery around pivots, and entrepreneurs ask all the time how you know it’s time to commit to a new direction. Which is a nice story.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, September 13, 2008 SEM on five dollars a day How do you build a new product with constant customer feedback while simultaneously staying under the radar? In a mature company with a mature product, the goal is to pay for lots of people to come to your website. chatted five times?
They were deploying to production with every commit before they had an automated build server or extensive automated test coverage in place. Initially, IMVU sought to quickly build a product that would prove out the soundness of their ideas and test the validity of their business model.
In my experience, the majority of changes we made to products have no effect at all on customer behavior. This kind of result is typical when you ship a redesign of some part of your product. Without split-testing, your product tends to get prettier over time. First of all, why split-test?
Its inspired by the classic OODA Loop and is really just a simplified version of that concept, applied specifically to creating a software product development team. There are three stages: We start with ideas about what our product could be. Labels: agile , listening to customers 3comments: hauteroute said. Great points Eric.
Think of Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon), Guido van Rossem (founder of Python programming language and senior engineer at Dropbox) or the more senior Gerard Kleisterlee (chairman of Vodafone). We have great intellectual property protection, and have efficient ways to enforce contracts. Think Philips Electronics, NXP, ASML and Tom Tom.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, September 10, 2008 Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now A great checklist of techniques and tools for making your development more agile, written from a Rail perspective. Expo SF (May.
Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Expo SF (May.
In the very early days, the trick is to find anyone at all who can understand you when you are talking about your product. In our first year at IMVU, we thought we were building a 3D avatar chat product. As product people, we thought of competition in terms of features. that we learned different. Expo SF (May.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 22, 2008 Thoughts on scientific product development I enjoyed reading a post today from Laserlike (Mike Speiser), on Scientific product development. You cant do science and be defensive at the same time. By starting a new product off with as few features as possible (1?),
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 1, 2008 Test-Driven Development as andon cord You cannot control what you cannot see, and the hardest part of managing software projects is that the final product is so intangible. These tests are written by the engineers themselves, and they must all pass every time. Expo SF (May.
You can find out what it would take for them to adopt your product, and then follow up a week later and see if they did. Same with finding out what it would take to get them to recommend your product to a friend. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? You can even meet the friend.
Digital tools include websites, mobile sites, social media outlets, the internet, and products and services that are promoted on the internet. Digital governance helps to keep organizations agile, nimble and adaptable, which is necessary in today’s age of evolution and disruption. Best Practices for a Digital Governance Team.
Many of them have really cool products shipping or about to be released, and I wholeheartedly agree with my friends at the iFund that the next generation of applications is going to be amazing. The store determines which products sit on which shelves, and which yours sits next to. Ive also been playing around with the App Store.
Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Expo SF (May.
So one of the first things we did was to hire an Oracle expert and get to work. You can turn your entire application infrastructure investment into a pay-as-you-go variable cost, and bring new products to market at speeds an order of magnitude faster than just 10 years ago. 1 comments: flixsterwidgettest said. yeah, its awesome.
I see startups struggle with this all the time. You have customers, they are using your product, and you are trying to help them. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Life is so easy in the days before the "launch" - you just focus on building and polishing those new features.
We had all the tools in place but we didn’t actually practice agile development. No fancy tools needed here — it’s about the mentality, attention to detail, and the actions that foster agile development, not the tools & systems you set up in place to facilitate this. Expo SF (May.
Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Expo SF (May.
A growing startup with a well-run product team will have a history of steady progress. For readers concerned about the chasm, I recommend reading Seth Godin's thoughts on "Being remarkable" and finding a unique edge/twist for your products and marketing (edgecraft). How do you plan for it? Expo SF (May.
Usability testing is great for coming up with ideas about what to change in your product, but dont forget to split-test those ideas to make sure they work, too. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Expo SF (May. Conference streaming, sponsors, discounted tickets.
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