Austin CTO Hire Product Development 
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 30, 2008
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."
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 22, 2008
Paid - if your product monetizes customers better than your competitors, you have the opportunity to use your lifetime value advantage to drive growth. In this model, you take some fraction of the lifetime value of each customer and plow that back into paid acquisition through SEM, banner ads, PR, affiliates, etc.
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Startup Lessons Learned
DECEMBER 7, 2008
And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Even with the highest standards imaginable, theres no way to hire just genius hackers. Hire a CTO or VP Engineering. Worst of all, your teammates are constantly wanting to have meetings.
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. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 15, 2008
The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 15, 2008
This gets me into trouble, because it conjures up for some the idea that product development is simply a rote mechanical exercise of linear optimization. You just constantly test little micro-changes and follow a hill-climbing algorithm to build your product. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Startup Lessons Learned
MAY 7, 2009
For people we hired from larger companies especially, this was challenging. When a new engineer started at IMVU, I had a simple rule: they had to ship code to production on their first day. Making this fear-reduction strategy work required more than just the core team getting used to continuous deployment. Interesting article, Eric.
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