YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Through rapid experimentation, short product development cycles, and rigorous measurements of the right metrics, they can ascertain what customers really want. Customer development (the understanding of customer needs) must be married to agile development (a process which drives waste out of product development).

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 14, 2014

As companies strive to stay agile and innovative, they’ve discovered that units of 8 to 12 people work best as the natural size of high-performance teams. This is the magic number for leadership teams, product teams, research teams, design teams, and more.

Agile 196

Agile Leadership Architecture Product Development 196

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

When Ive asked mentors of mine who have worked in big companies about the role of the CTO, they usually talk about the importance of being the external face of the companys technology platform; an evangelist to developers, customers, and employees. Thats more than just drawing architecture diagrams, though. What made them exceptional?

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

ConversionXL

JUNE 19, 2018

Development = rules. Alexa Hubley: The Agile Marketing Playbook. Create your agile process: Map (start at the end). It’s not about technology, but customer centricity + agility, data drivenness. Evidence-based customer-centric product development. Design = rules. Content = rules. Failure is learning.

Technical Review 103

Technical Review Agile Analytics Conversion 103

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

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

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. And this was a huge product, which took years to develop.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

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

Venture Chronicles

AUGUST 2, 2013

If we did anything egregiously wrong at Get Satisfaction in the 2010-1012 time period it was to under-invest in the product with the assumption that the existing product was good enough. engineers paired would jump from frontend to backend erratically at each sprint iteration.

Product 62

Product CTO Hire Architecture Startup 62

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

It’s important to invest in good architecture so that your website will scale once customers arrive. If you make that investment, and then customers arrive, and the site stays up, most companies will reward the people who built the architecture and, thus, prevented the scaling problems. Why do they harbor that paranoia?

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

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. When talking about their past experience, candidates with agility will know why they did what they did in a given situation.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 14, 2013

The site visits include stops at Square (the payments startup founded by Twitter co-creator Jack Dorsey), WeWork Soma (an amazing co-working space) and Pivotal Labs (leaders in Lean and Agile consulting), along with one more super-interesting location we’ll announce shortly. If there’s a problem in production, developers need to own it.

Continuous Deployment 162

Continuous Deployment Norway Lean Analytics 162

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

I know them right away - we can talk high-level architecture all the way down to the bits-and-bytes of his system. When the architecture needs modifying - why do we need a meeting? Building a good application architecture is not just coding. The "just fix it" mentality is counter-productive here. Just change it.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products. The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on?

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Wed never heard of five whys, and we had plenty of "agile skeptics" on the team. Wanted to add one additional note from the perspective of someone who was intimately involved in developing this system. It seems your cluster architecture is one of the key architectural constraints making continuous deployment possible.

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. Support multiple sharding schemes. Easy to understand.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

Its an essential discipline of good software development, especially in startups. 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. Doesnt that sound good?

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. Yet a huge class of modern software projects are being developed in a very different context.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

Even more surprisingly, the engineering team was equally vocal about their contention that adding rounded corners would add weeks of development time to the project, which would have pushed it out way past its hard deadline, effectively killing it. The engineering team wasn’t happy either. The engineering team wasn’t happy either.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

He turned his PhD thesis into a killer product, got it funded and now was CEO of a company of 30. It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. We’re building the wrong product!” And the rule was we weren’t changing anything about the product architecture until Ben and I agreed.

Founder 316

Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 316

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Thats a perfectly reasonable reaction, given that most releases of most products are bad news. Even worse, the sad state of product development generally means that the new "features" are as likely to be ones that make the product worse, not better. In a successful startup, the development team is also growing.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

You dont need to invent a new architecture, and you dont need to even build your architecture up-front. You can turn your entire application infrastructure investment into a pay-as-you-go variable cost, and bring new products to market at speeds an order of magnitude faster than just 10 years ago. yeah, its awesome.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

If youre looking for resources on getting started, see " Continuous deployment in 5 easy steps ") The goal of continuous deployment is to help development teams drive waste out of their process by simultaneously reducing the batch size and increasing the tempo of their work. How severely is failure punished?

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

femgineer.com

JULY 18, 2010

HOME About the Femgineer Speaking Engagements Reading List Recruiting Startup Engineers With the startup market taking off, there is always a clamor to find good engineers, developers, and designers. I think its important to keep that in mind rather than always trying to covet a rock star developer with a proven track record.

Engineer 41

Engineer Software Review Startup Technical Review 41

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

This is one of the most powerful aspects of web architecture, and it often gets lost in other client-server programming paradigms. As you suggest, Thought Experiment Part II is going to involve lots of changes to the classic MMO architecture that makes it more like the web. Thanks for the comments. Expo SF (May.

Continuous Deployment 68

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

I started my last company with 100% off-shore resources because I could never have completed Customer Development at a reasonable cost of money or regulatory burden had I employed US Citizens. Government IT solutions can be iterative, they don't have to be designed down to the last detail by architecture astronauts before implementation.

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90