Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 5, 2010

I believe it is the best introduction to Customer Development you can buy. As all of you know, Steve Blank is the progenitor of Customer Development and author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany. I have personally sold many copies of his book, and continue to recommend it as one of the most important books a startup founder can read.

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 166

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process. Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations.

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San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

SoCal CTO

JANUARY 5, 2011

First Principles. Steve Blank , January 25, 2010 10 Tips for Adding Game Mechanics to a Non-Gaming Service - ReadWriteStart , September 21, 2010 Startups & VCs: Learn How to Design, Market, & Eat Your Own. -

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Silicon Valley Startup Term Sheet Venture Capital 378

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, July 9, 2010 Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# theory of management At any given time, something like four percent of the US population is engaged in some form of new-company-creation. But I’m not convinced those labels are right at all.

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San Francisco Management Founder Lean 161

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. Labels: customer development , lean startup 8comments: Amy said.

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Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration. I do this as a core part of the Product Management process I use at all startups. You refer to an anonymous Valley-based MMORPG that consumed years and tens of millions in development, but got little commercial traction. There was only one such company.

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San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Wanted to add one additional note from the perspective of someone who was intimately involved in developing this system. When Eric writes, "By the time we started doing continuous integration, we had tens of thousands of lines of code, all not under test coverage." Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

If you havent seen it, Pascals recent presentation on continuous deployment is a must-see; slides are here. To shed some light, I talked with kaChing , a destination that enables individual investors to find outstanding money managers to manage their money. kaChing has been very active in the Lean Startup movement.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

I spent some time with his company before the conference and discussed ways to get started with continuous deployment , including my experience introducing it at IMVU. Moreover, approaching the problem from the direction that I had intuitively is a recipe for never reaching a point where continuous deployment is feasible.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review Lean 131

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

When Ive asked mentors of mine who have worked in big companies about the role of the CTO, they usually talk about the importance of being the external face of the companys technology platform; an evangelist to developers, customers, and employees. So what does CTO mean, besides just "technical founder who really cant manage anyone?"

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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. For more on continuous deployment, see Just-in-time Scalability.

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Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 7, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, January 7, 2010 Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? My explicit goal in working with HBR is to foster a dialog between entrepreneurs and more traditional general managers. Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? - Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Without further ado.

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San Francisco Management Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Feld Thoughts

MARCH 11, 2010

I’ve become a big advocate of true Agile development (partly because of my experience with Rally Software – the leader in Agile software development environments) and – more recently – the notion of trying to get to continuous deployment which has been popularized by Eric Ries. Some release weekly, or even daily.

Software Review 138

Software Review Wiki Continuous Deployment Agile 138

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. But I managed a few "good learning experiences" before throwing myself full-bore into IMVU. So much for timing.

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San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Oops - there went several precious weeks of development effort down the drain. And if you dont know who your customer is, perhaps some customer development is in order? Labels: customer development , search engine marketing 13comments: Jim Lindstrom said. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 14, 2013

Jonathan Irwin will lead a workshop on advanced interview skills , including the different kinds of customer interviews, how to develop questions, and how to apply the answers to an actual decision around a product. Thus we reduce the risk of deployments. How do you address that? Needless to say, this is a slow and complex process.

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Continuous Deployment Norway Lean Analytics 162

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The goal is to have split-testing be a continuous part of our development process, so much so that it is considered a completely routine part of developing a new feature. I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 16, 2013

We work in prototypically four-week iterations, with quality engineers and software developers working in close collaboration. During this period, the Palantir Gotham team grew from five developers to around 35. But we couldn''t have identified this without having clear metrics (that high bug count) to assess our development process.

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Lean Startup Software Engineering Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

It allows teams to diagnose sources of waste in their development process and continuously improve, reversing the usual trend of teams getting slower over time. These problems can be anything: development mistakes, site outages, marketing program failures, or even internal missed schedules.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 4, 2010

Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development. Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Want to learn more about me?

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Agile Software Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 99

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. I had a background in lean manufacturing (book knowledge, anyway) and lean software development (hands on) before encountering Lean Startups.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 140

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. It has to be found and managed. Leverage is work, though.

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Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes. Labels: agile , continuous deployment 1 comments: timothyfitz said. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

Integration risk is the term I use to describe the costs of having code sitting on some, but not all, developers machines. Maybe two different developers made changes to the same underlying subsystem, but in incompatible ways. It happens whenever youre writing code on your own machine, or you have a team working on a branch.

Software Review 136

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Only much later did I realize that this was an application of customer development to online marketing. There is much work that I need to do (the only developer so far) before we have something customers can use. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

This is the first post that moves into making specific process recommendations for product development. You can view previous essays in this series here: Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Labels: product development Speed up or slow down? Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Software Review 141

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 3, 2009

When I was a manager, I was once leading a cycle post-mortem. We were talking about what went right and wrong in the companys development process, when one (relatively new) employee said something like "I noticed that problem, but I couldnt do anything about it." Utopian theoretics make great blogs but not great managers.

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Employee San Francisco Lean Software Review 146

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

But its not very open, and not very programmable, unless you have an expensive Mac and an approved developer license. Not only are there free compilers and development systems, but there are also a number of efforts to develop development systems and languages specifically aimed at teaching kids to program.

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Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 142

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

Even if men have an innate advantage at software development, the gap would have to be massive in order to explain why startup after startup has an all-male team. And yet, when I suggest this practice to hiring managers and recruiters alike, they rarely do it. For more on this subject, take a look at The product managers lament.

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San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 2, 2010

You can view previous essays in this series here: Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Labels: five whys root cause analysis The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business Review) I continue my series for Harvard Business Review with the Lean Startup technique called Five Whys. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Technical Review 132

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 132

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

They are leaders, visionaries, founders and managers having tremendous success. Even more surprisingly, the engineering team was equally vocal about their contention that adding rounded corners would add weeks of development time to the project, which would have pushed it out way past its hard deadline, effectively killing it.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

And do your customer development. Inspiring ideas: real-time biz metrics; safe continuous deployment; A/B split testing. You can learn more about that by reading The engineering managers lament.) The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Articulate, inspirational.

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San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Lean 113

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 1, 2008

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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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San Francisco Developer Continuous Deployment DC 68

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. None of it would have happened if we had plenty of cash, or were content to count our progress by traffic or product development milestones.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 98

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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