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.

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Advisory Board Customer San Francisco Lean 151

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.

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Lean San Francisco Web Advisory Board 68

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

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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San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Each cycle was punctuated by a meeting of our Business Advisory Board (BAB). As the CTO/VP Engineering, I was the worst offender. That means that I (and other engineers) were able to participate in the problem team discussions. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Heres what it looked like.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 167

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.

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San Francisco Customer Lean Continuous Deployment 131

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.

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San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

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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Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168