Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 25, 2011

It may be hard to remember that there was a time when people in the agile software development community thought Lean Startup was incompatible with agile practices. No BS, no vanity metrics, no launches, no PR. And those are just our keynotes! We also have an awesome lineup of case studies.

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San Francisco Silicon Valley Lean Agile 146

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Through rapid experimentation, short product development cycles, and rigorous measurements of the right metrics, they can ascertain what customers really want. Customer development (the understanding of customer needs) must be married to agile development (a process which drives waste out of product development).

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Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration. In a lot of cases, this requires a lot of energy invested in talking to customers or metrics and analytics. Refreshing to finally see lean and agile thinking emerge in product/business-floors and not only in technology. Thanks Eric. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Product development leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in product development. Its a key lean startup concept. Great post!

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Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

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. Ive attempted to embed the relevant slides below. Expo SF (May.

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Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

Eventually, I hope to get them on a full agile diet, with TDD, scrums, sprints, pair programming, and more. But first I think we need to save the product manager from that special form of torture only a waterfall product development team can create. Labels: product development 8comments: Vincent van Wylick said.

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San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Focus on the output metrics of that part of the product, and you make the problem a lot more clear. I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. Whatever its purpose, try measuring it only at the level that you care about.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

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. Joel said it: "Top notch development teams dont torture their programmers."

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Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

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. Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage.

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Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Because five whys kept turning up a few key metrics that were hard to set static thresholds for, we even had a dynamic prediction algorithm that would make forecasts based on past data, and fire alerts if the metric ever went out of its normal bounds. Wed never heard of five whys, and we had plenty of "agile skeptics" on the team.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

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. I agree with the less is more product development approach, but for a different reason. Now that is fun.

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Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 68

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? Labels: product development 15comments: mukund said. But along the way, something strange happened. How can it work if some folks are pre-building and others use five whys to drive decisions?

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CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

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? Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campa. Expo SF (May.

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Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

This theory has become so influential that I have called it one of the three pillars of the lean startup - every bit as important as the changes in technology or the advent of agile development. You can learn about customer development, and quite a bit more, in Steves book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Expo SF (May.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

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.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, March 25, 2009 The Lean Startup at Agile Vancouver April 21st A surprising number of respondents in the latest Lessons Learned survey hail from one of the flourishing startup hubs in Canada. Combining agile development with customer developm. And when did there get to be 3000 of you?

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Agile Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Luckily, I now have the benefit of a forthcoming book, The Principles of Product Development Flow. Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 11comments: Peter Severin said. Sounds very similar to agile development which is the way. Interesting post. February 21, 2009 7:39 AM Rocky1138 said.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Every board meeting, the metrics of success change. Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. And what of the product development team? Go on an agile diet quickly. And yet, their investors are frustrated.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 24, 2009 The metrics and levers of engagement, presentation on Engagement Loops for Facebook Developer Garage SF Ill be presenting a talk at the Facebook Developer Garage SF Wednesday evening. What good are these metrics if they dont help guide product or business decisions?

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Metrics San Francisco Lean Viral 88

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customer development , the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop , and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience. Creating a company-wide feedback loop that incorporates both customer development and agile development is a challenge.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

This builds on a lot of great thinking that has come before, like the agile movements insistence that only the creation of working code counts as progress for a software development team. I used to think that investments in metrics were a form of waste. I used to think that investments in metrics were a form of waste.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 98

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 16, 2013

One good example is the way in which we''ve adjusted the length of different phases of our agile sprints. We don''t follow a set agile methodology, but rather follow a more home-grown, minimal version of various approaches. The result was a new process of four-week iterative cycles all about throttling new code.

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Lean Startup Software Engineering Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

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. While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

This is the first post that moves into making specific process recommendations for product development. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? Labels: product development Speed up or slow down? Expo SF (May.

Software Review 141

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2009

For those whove heard it, it contains a length discourse on the subject of agile software development and extreme programming, including its weaknesses when applied to startups. As Im pontificating about agile, I see the name Kent Beck in my peripheral vision. Now, this webcast was packed, hundreds of people were logged in.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 140

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Boyd emphasized the importance of agility in combat: "the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than ones opponent." Agile software development. Agile allows companies to build higher quality software faster. Hopefully others will find it useful as well.

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Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

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. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 142

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 2, 2010

And yet the key to startup speed is to maintain a disciplined approach to testing and evaluating new products, features, and ideas. As start-ups scale, this agility will be lost unless the founders maintain a consistent investment in that discipline. Start-ups supposedly dont have time for detailed processes and procedures.

Technical Review 132

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 132

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

At least, not in the traditional sense of trying to squeeze every tenth of a point out of a conversion metric or landing page. In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. For example, I’m a big believer in split-testing.

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San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 3, 2009

In order to give people the data they need to apply the strategy, we were very open with our company metrics, making all reports generally available and easy to run. When you think a certain feature will give a 50% boost to a given metric, and it only eeks out a 5% boost, you cant spin that as failure. March 9, 2009 8:35 AM Eric said.

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Employee San Francisco Lean Software Review 146

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 6, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 6, 2008 When NOT to listen to your users; when NOT to rely on split-tests There are three legs to the lean startup concept: agile product development , low-cost (fast to market) platforms , and rapid-iteration customer development. I think Drucker said it best. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 128

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

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.

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SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. Growth - when you have existing customers, the pressure is on to grow your key metrics day-in day-out. And if you neglect maintenance, you may not have a business left at all. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

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.

Software Review 68

Software Review San Francisco Technical Review Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Despite all the energy invested in talking to authors about the size of their platform, very few gatekeepers have a rigorous set of metrics for measuring it. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. My blog has over 14000 subscribers, for example. Is that a lot?

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

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.

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Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

YoungUpstarts

MARCH 4, 2015

In order to grow, startups need a much more focused, realistic and agile approach to goal setting that builds momentum and establishes a pattern of success. Use OKRs to establish how company success is measured, establish a metrics-driven culture and track performance progress. For startups, agility is a must. How OKRs Can Help.

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Agile Startup Cofounder Metrics 100