Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Even though some aspects of the product were eventually vindicated as good ones, the underlying architecture suffered from hard-to-change assumptions. Without conscious process design, product development teams turn lines of code written into momentum in a certain direction. Even a great architecture becomes inflexible.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

I hope to show why lean and agile techniques actually reduce the negative impacts of technical debt and increase our ability to take advantage of its positive effects. Just as a business incurs some debt to take advantage of a market opportunity developers may incur technical debt to hit an important deadline.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of Product Development Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Managing timelines instead of queues.

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

Balancing competing objectives is a recurring theme on this blog - its the central challenge of all management decisions. The technical interview is at the heart of these challenges when building a product development team, and so I thought it deserved an entire post on its own. The six key attributes spell ABCDEF: Agility.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Wed never heard of five whys, and we had plenty of "agile skeptics" on the team. The five whys methodology has been around for some time, not just as a continuous improvement technique, but as a general problem solving method in all areas of management. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, January 4, 2009 Sharding for startups The most important aspect of a scalable web architecture is data partitioning. So far, this is just a summary of what all of us who have attempted to build web-scale architectures considers obvious. Customer data is normally partitioned according to customer id.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

In a few cases, they are clearly smart people in a bad situation, and Ive written about their pain in The product managers lament and The engineering managers lament. I know them right away - we can talk high-level architecture all the way down to the bits-and-bytes of his system. Just change it.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

They are leaders, visionaries, founders and managers having tremendous success. I suggested that we change the underlying architecture of our UI system so that the artists would be able to build their own UI pieces themselves and then integrate them into the product without requiring new code every time.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

So did I when I finally found myself building an app with real scalability, a few years later, but a combination of our just-in-time scalability technique and great open source scaling tools, made it manageable. You dont need to invent a new architecture, and you dont need to even build your architecture up-front. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

The engineering team has decided its reached a breaking point, and is taking several weeks to bring it up to modern standards, including unit tests, getting started with continuous integration , and a new MVC architecture. On the other, they already have a team fully engaged on making their product architecture better.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

And as Kapor himself points out, the core ideas have even older origins: The Roman architecture critic Vitruvius advanced the notion that well-designed buildings were those which exhibited firmness, commodity, and delight. This includes the designers as well as the engineers and product managers. We owe a lot to this seminal document.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

These two extreme positions lead to factional strife in development teams, which is extremely unpleasant. Managers start to make a note of who’s on which faction, and then assign projects accordingly. My last job was as a build and release manager. I'd be constantly redefining done for developers.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Switching these customers directly to continuous deployment sounds harder than it really is. A typical "new feature" release is, in my experience, about 80% changes to underlying APIs or architecture. Continuous deployment offers three significant advantages over large batch development systems. I just dont believe it.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Someone has managed to convince themselves that they have to do their big architecture change in one fell swoop. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Expo SF (May.

Product Development 68

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 68

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

Lets start with a distinction between shipping new software to the customer, and changing the customers experience. The idea is that often you can change the customers experience without shipping them new software at all. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Continuous Deployment 68

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

It has to be found and managed. In that same spirit, here are some suggestions for tactics you can use to increase the leverage of your product development efforts: Free and open source software (and even hardware ). Open APIs and data-oriented architecture (aka "web 2.0"). Yeah, weve got that. Leverage is work, though.

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

Policy makers need to know: regulations designed to manage big-companies actually protect those companies by stifling innovation (and competition) from startups. Government IT solutions can be iterative, they don't have to be designed down to the last detail by architecture astronauts before implementation. Expo SF (May.

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DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

Coupled with A/B testing, customer development, and thinking through business problems in a scientific, hypothesis-driven way, you end up with a powerful cocktail of techniques to build a modern startup in the most iterative way possible. If you liked this post, please subscribe or follow me on Twitter. what a coincidence.

Technical Review 47

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47