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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."
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.
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.
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 productdevelopment team. Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?
The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in productdevelopment. 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.
This gets me into trouble, because it conjures up for some the idea that productdevelopment 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.
“Everybody felt the burden of supporting all those transactions every day,&# says Pascal-Louis Perez, kaChing’s CTO. “It took a ton of our time, and just wasn’t contributing to our long term vision.&# “It took a ton of our time, and just wasn’t contributing to our long term vision.&#
Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) Eric, I landed upon your blog when I was searching for the path to CTO a couple of months back and I have been a frequent to the site since then. Your "startup-lessons-learned" are very valuable.
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.
In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown, and the key to success is building an integrated team that includes productdevelopment in the feedback loop with customers. 2008 09 06 Eric Ries Haas Columbia Customer Development Engineering View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.
The more work youve sunk into a product or vision, the harder it is to let it go. As the CTO/VP Engineering, I was the worst offender. Ironically, although its the solution team that is the early-warning system ("canary in the coal mine") for pivots, its actually hard for the solution team to make the decision to pivot.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 22, 2008 Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment I enjoyed reading a post today from Laserlike (Mike Speiser), on Scientific productdevelopment. I agree with the less is more productdevelopment approach, but for a different reason. Now that is fun.
Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Q&A with an actual reader The lean startup comes to Stanford You don't need as many tools as you think The three drivers of growth for your business mode. Take a look and let me know what you think.
This simple feedback loop has proven its worth to me time and again. Its inspired by the classic OODA Loop and is really just a simplified version of that concept, applied specifically to creating a software productdevelopment team. There are three stages: We start with ideas about what our product could be.
Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Q&A with an actual reader The lean startup comes to Stanford You don't need as many tools as you think The three drivers of growth for your business mode. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Q&A with an actual reader The lean startup comes to Stanford You don't need as many tools as you think The three drivers of growth for your business mode. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Q&A with an actual reader The lean startup comes to Stanford You don't need as many tools as you think The three drivers of growth for your business mode. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Q&A with an actual reader The lean startup comes to Stanford You don't need as many tools as you think The three drivers of growth for your business mode. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Q&A with an actual reader The lean startup comes to Stanford You don't need as many tools as you think The three drivers of growth for your business mode. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Q&A with an actual reader The lean startup comes to Stanford You don't need as many tools as you think The three drivers of growth for your business mode. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Q&A with an actual reader The lean startup comes to Stanford You don't need as many tools as you think The three drivers of growth for your business mode. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Q&A with an actual reader The lean startup comes to Stanford You don't need as many tools as you think The three drivers of growth for your business mode. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Q&A with an actual reader The lean startup comes to Stanford You don't need as many tools as you think The three drivers of growth for your business mode. Take a look and let me know what you think.
So one of the first things we did was to hire an Oracle expert and get to work. Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? I was building a new startup in 1999, and wanted to do it right. I had heard that all great companies built their applications on Oracle.
Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Q&A with an actual reader The lean startup comes to Stanford You don't need as many tools as you think The three drivers of growth for your business mode. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Q&A with an actual reader The lean startup comes to Stanford You don't need as many tools as you think The three drivers of growth for your business mode. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Q&A with an actual reader The lean startup comes to Stanford You don't need as many tools as you think The three drivers of growth for your business mode. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Q&A with an actual reader The lean startup comes to Stanford You don't need as many tools as you think The three drivers of growth for your business mode. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Q&A with an actual reader The lean startup comes to Stanford You don't need as many tools as you think The three drivers of growth for your business mode. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Q&A with an actual reader The lean startup comes to Stanford You don't need as many tools as you think The three drivers of growth for your business mode. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Q&A with an actual reader The lean startup comes to Stanford You don't need as many tools as you think The three drivers of growth for your business mode. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Q&A with an actual reader The lean startup comes to Stanford You don't need as many tools as you think The three drivers of growth for your business mode. Take a look and let me know what you think.
At IMVU, when wed hire a new engineer, we could get them to ship code to production on their first day, even if they had never programmed in PHP before. Which makes them exactly the kind of programmers companies should want to hire. In my role as a CTO, Ive always tried to choose the right tool for the right job.
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