Advisory Board Cofounder Continuous Deployment Engineer 
Startup Lessons Learned
OCTOBER 26, 2009
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 26, 2009 A real Customer Advisory Board A reader recently asked on a previous post about the technique of having customers periodically produce a “state of the company&# progress report. One example is having a real Customer Advisory Board.
Startup Lessons Learned
OCTOBER 4, 2008
He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting.
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Startup Lessons Learned
FEBRUARY 9, 2009
If youre interested in being part of my "customer advisory board" for this presentation, please get in touch. Eric, if youre looking for any help as a "customer advisory board", Id love to do anything I can to help. I would love to be on your advisory board. And thats where the call for help comes in.
Startup Lessons Learned
JUNE 22, 2009
Some startups fail because the founders cant have this conversation - they either blow up when they try, or they fail to change because they are afraid of conflict. Although I wish I could take credit for these pivots, the reality is that they were not caused by my singular insight or that of my other co-founders.
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 14, 2008
Later, when the company was much larger, we had everyone on our engineering team agree to sit in on one usability test every month. It wasnt a huge time commitment, but it meant that every engineer was getting regular contact with an actual customer, which was invaluable. Establish a customer advisory board.
Startup Lessons Learned
OCTOBER 5, 2009
Imagine you hear from an engineer that they are worried that a certain payment subsystem is unreliable, and will therefore double-charge some customers. If we’re practicing continuous deployment, we can be confident that we’ll be able to rush an emergency fix into production without risking introducing further problems.
Startup Lessons Learned
JULY 29, 2009
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. The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future. One last thought.
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