Remove Advisory Board Remove Continuous Deployment Remove Customer Development Remove Engineer
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A real Customer Advisory Board

Startup Lessons Learned

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. Many companies seek to involve customers directly in the creation of their products.

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The lean startup @ Web 2.0 Expo (and a call for help)

Startup Lessons Learned

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. Hey Someone else who is extending the agile/lean approach beyond just developing software.

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Lessons Learned: About the author

Startup Lessons Learned

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. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms.

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How to listen to customers, and not just the loud people

Startup Lessons Learned

It required hearing customers say it over and over again for us to take a serious look, and eventually to realize that social networking was core to our business. Later, when the company was much larger, we had everyone on our engineering team agree to sit in on one usability test every month. Establish a customer advisory board.

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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

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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A large batch of videos, slides, and audio

Startup Lessons Learned

Or watch my full #leanstartup presentation at Seedcamp in London: And two bonus videos that are well worth watching (weally): Timothy Fitz, who worked for me at IMVU, giving an in-depth presentation on the details of the continuous deployment system that we built there. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Pivot, don't jump to a new vision

Startup Lessons Learned

Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. IMVU had a roughly two-month-long development cycle. Each cycle was punctuated by a meeting of our Business Advisory Board (BAB). As the CTO/VP Engineering, I was the worst offender. Heres what it looked like.