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Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customerdevelopment? When we build products, we use a methodology. But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit."
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 CustomerDevelopment Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Its a nice complement on the product engineering side to his customerdevelopment methodology.
I believe it is the best introduction to CustomerDevelopment you can buy. As all of you know, Steve Blank is the progenitor of CustomerDevelopment and author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany. You can imagine how well that worked. On the minus side, that has made it a wee bit hard to understand.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customerdevelopment Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. In most agile development systems, there is a notion of the "product backlog" a prioritized list of what software is most valuable to be developed next.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, December 23, 2009 Why vanity metrics are dangerous In a previous post, I defined two kinds of metrics: vanity metrics and actionable metrics. In this post, Id like to talk about the perils of vanity metrics. My personal favorite vanity metrics is "hits."
Long before there was the Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas or CustomerDevelopment there was a guy in Santa Barbara California who had already figured it out. Frank Robinson of SyncDev has been helping companies figure out their minimum viable product and pivots since 1984, long before I even knew what it meant.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Productdevelopment 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 productdevelopment. Its a key lean startup concept. Great post!
The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in productdevelopment. See CustomerDevelopment Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the CustomerDevelopment process.
Through rapid experimentation, short productdevelopment cycles, and rigorous measurements of the right metrics, they can ascertain what customers really want. Such direct experiences allows one to test critical “leap-of-faith” assumptions about what customers like and dislike.
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 customerdevelopment process. Labels: customerdevelopment , split-test 7comments: Editor said.
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.
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.
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. As a result, potential customers are being turned away; they can only afford to engage with the customers that are best qualified.
At least, not in the traditional sense of trying to squeeze every tenth of a point out of a conversion metric or landing page. Instead, we try to accelerate with respect to validated learning about customers. There are often counter-intuitive changes in customer behavior that depend on little details.
Own the development methodology - in a traditional productdevelopment setup, the VP Engineering or some other full-time manager would be responsible for making sure the engineers wrote adequate specs, interfaced well with QA, and also run the scheduling "trains" for releases. Labels: productdevelopment 15comments: mukund said.
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?
If you cant find any , maybe that means you havent figured out who your customer is yet. And if you dont know who your customer is, perhaps some customerdevelopment is in order? Labels: customerdevelopment , search engine marketing 13comments: Jim Lindstrom said. What is customerdevelopment?
But first I think we need to save the product manager from that special form of torture only a waterfall productdevelopment team can create. Labels: productdevelopment 8comments: Vincent van Wylick said. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup?
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. He wrote it in 2000, and as far as I know has never updated it.
This is the first post that moves into making specific process recommendations for productdevelopment. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? Labels: productdevelopment Speed up or slow down?
Luckily, I now have the benefit of a forthcoming book, The Principles of ProductDevelopment Flow. Labels: five whys root cause analysis , productdevelopment 11comments: Peter Severin said. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? Interesting post.
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. What is customerdevelopment?
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 productdevelopment , low-cost (fast to market) platforms , and rapid-iteration customerdevelopment. I think Drucker said it best.
Those rates gave us a map that told us a lot about our customers; insights that proved stable even when the company grew orders of magnitude bigger. Only much later did I realize that this was an application of customerdevelopment to online marketing. Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?
Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their productdevelopment leverage. The biggest source of waste in new productdevelopment is building something that nobody wants. Leverage productdevelopment with open source and third parties.
Here’s his story of when CustomerDevelopment failed. We were lucky to learn about CustomerDevelopment early on in the life of our startup. More importantly, we’d witnessed CustomerDevelopment’s massive success at another local startup. So how did CustomerDevelopment fail us?
Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customerdevelopment , 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 customerdevelopment and agile development is a challenge.
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?
But we couldn''t have identified this without having clear metrics (that high bug count) to assess our development process. On CustomerDevelopment in a growing company, Wyatt offered the following advice: Wyatt: We''ve employed a number of systems in the organization that keep all of us close to the customer.
The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.
I used to think that investments in metrics were a form of waste. Customers dont care if you have good metrics, only if you have a good product. The only reason we learned the art of metrics-based decision making at IMVU was out of necessity. Labels: productdevelopment 4comments: Doug said.
The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.
Customerdevelopment. Its not enough just to build a product with great features - you have to figure out if there is a market for it. For those interested in getting started with agile or customerdevelopment, I thought Id include a few links. This speeds up the Ideas-Code-Data feedback loop.
The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.
Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ▼ June (3) What is a startup?
As a shoestring entrepreneur with a SaaS (well, not really, but sort of) offering that we present to very large companies (think 10K+), I love your common sense suggestions about metrics and testing. My background isnt metrics, but we came to it as a matter of practicality. 4) More posts about metrics, scaling, and online games.
The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.
And other startups are in a New Market — creating a market from scratch (like Apple with the iPhone, or iPod/iTunes.) (“Market Type&# radically changes how you sell and market at each step in CustomerDevelopment. It’s one of the subtle distinctions that at times gets lost in the process.
Early customerdevelopment talks are going great which keeps the team really excited. No updates, screen comps, or metrics have been publicly shared yet. This is all a part of the normal product and customerdevelopment process,” the CEO tells the team. Three months in, the burn is now at $70k/month.
The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.
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.
Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. Usually, that will be about finding new segments of customers that the company can profitably serve. What is customerdevelopment?
And do your customerdevelopment. Inspiring ideas: real-time biz metrics; safe continuous deployment; A/B split testing. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? Provide early seed capital, and be the ones to make those introductions. Articulate, inspirational.
Labels: five whys root cause analysis , productdevelopment 15comments: Anonymoussaid. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? Leave your thoughts in a comment. If you’ve tried Five Whys, please share your experiences so far. I’ll do my best to help.)
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