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. This engineering manager is a smart guy, and very experienced.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Its a nice complement on the product engineering side to his customer development methodology.

Customer Development 131

Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

View from Seed

NOVEMBER 6, 2014

You always want to be careful with how tightly you schedule things to make sure you stay agile and responsive to evolving business needs, but you also need to make sure your overall journey makes sense and that you’re building things in the right order, as well as taking on risks in a measured way.

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Technology Ruby Startup Engineer 334

Andrew Payne

FEBRUARY 17, 2020

Occasionally, academics wade into the debate with data, including researchers at CMU’s Sofware Engineering Institute , who recently noted: […] while some programmers are better or faster than others, the scale and usefulness of this [10x] difference has been greatly exaggerated.

Software Review 111

Software Review Dividend Architecture Agile 111

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2011

The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. Ironically it becomes the antithesis of agile. My observation was that the CEO and VP of Engineering were confusing cause and effect. In reality this is a fools choice.

Part-Time VPE 318

Part-Time VPE Agile Engineer Startup 318

www.bothsidesofthetable.com

MAY 13, 2012

Want to Know Difference Between a CTO and a VP of Engineering? This time I thought I’d try and address engineering talent. Often I’m asked by startup CEO’s about how to best build an engineering team. Your deepest thinkers on technology architecture are seldom good team leaders. Raising Venture Capital.

Fractional VPE 89

Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE Fractional CTO CTO Hire 89

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 13, 2020

There are several lines of effort that we’re focusing on: We’re working to build the Space Force as a very Lean and Agile service. Everybody that comes into the space force will learn coding and adopt digital engineering standards as our as our standard for acquisition. We’re also focusing on partnerships.

Technology 284

Technology United States Iraq Operations 284

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Customer development (the understanding of customer needs) must be married to agile development (a process which drives waste out of product development). Pivots can take the form of changes to singular product features, customer segments, platforms, business architecture, growth engines, technology and more.

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Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Start Up Blog

NOVEMBER 22, 2019

Fire can keep our houses warm, cook our food and power a combustion engine, but it can also burn down a city if we don’t build in thoughtful safeguards. Of course, they’ll keep coming thick and fast: Digital twins, mesh architecture, hyper automation, human augmentation, bio-tech interfaces, and autonomous things.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Widget Architecture Government 78

Lightspeed Venture Partners

OCTOBER 3, 2013

We have seen the rise of the cloud, the shift away from PCs to new mobile computing platforms, and the emergence of Big Data and Analytics as a core enabler of business agility. With these trends as a backdrop, we are in the early innings of a massive redirection of enterprise IT budgets towards new technologies and architectures.

Cloud 161

Cloud Security Analytics Mobile 161

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. Engineers love to build, solve tough problems, and make progress. Motivating Them Engineers are motivated by a variety of things.

Engineer 41

Engineer Software Review Startup Technical Review 41

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? But since I spent a long time in a hybrid CTO/VP Engineering role, I still have this nagging question. Heres my take.

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CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Venture Chronicles

AUGUST 2, 2013

The early architecture conditions created what engineers called “technical debt” and that effectively became weaponized to stall significant investment in fixing the old in order to build the future. engineers paired would jump from frontend to backend erratically at each sprint iteration.

Product 62

Product CTO Hire Architecture Startup 62

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2023

This meant the class was team-based, Lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering) and experiential – where the students, rather than being presented with all of the essential information, must discover that information rapidly for themselves.

Lean 294

Lean Chile Ukraine Spain 294

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

JULY 29, 2009

The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. 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. Reconciling these principles requires a little humility. It was still a good trade.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 4, 2017

Sure, when WP Engine launches a new product, the marketing department needs predictability for the launch date, but that’s because it’s a highly-skilled, well-funded group, which explodes with press, events, campaigns, social media, and newsletters, grabbing more attention in a single week than a smaller company might garner in a year.

Government 223

Government Startup Cofounder Technical Support 223

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 31, 2018

In many respects, it’s the leanness, flexibility and agility of startups that help them become successful,” he says. It is based on over six thousand years of concrete applications in architecture, urban planning, social engineering, human relationship building, tools, processes, as well as communications.

United Kingdom 113

United Kingdom Technical Review Design Operations 113

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. You can also download our presentation, " Just-In-Time Scalability: Agile Methods to Support Massive Growth." Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

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. For these reasons, two-pizza teams are usually more agile and responsive than their bloated peers. An engineer will get her hands dirty to ensure the product is perfect at launch.

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Agile Leadership Architecture Product Development 196

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. After years of engineering effort, changing these assumptions was incredibly hard. Even a great architecture becomes inflexible. Once again, a fantastic post. Great post!

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

I was an engineer on the engineering team. For one, the engineers consider the artists stupid; the artists consider the engineers arrogant. The engineering team would then build that feature, mimicking the UI as close as they could using the current primitives supported by the system. The meeting was tense.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

Finding great engineers is hard; figuring out whos good is even harder. 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. I have found this quite rare in engineers. At first, I thought I was doing well.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

YoungUpstarts

FEBRUARY 14, 2017

One of the great benefits of a startup is their ability to be agile and adapt quickly to a changing environment. Business architecture pivot. There are two types of business architectures: High Volume, Low Margin which is a volume-based business and High Margin, Low Volume which is a complex business model.

Technical Review 157

Technical Review Architecture Revenue Channel 157

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Its why, at my previous job, we were able to get a new engineer completely productive on their first day. Most engineers would ship code to production on their first day. Let me show you what this looked like after a few years of practicing five whys in the operations and engineering teams at IMVU.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

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. How do you address that?

Continuous Deployment 162

Continuous Deployment Norway Lean Analytics 162

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. Reinertsen is the book for you.

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

ARM, a competitor, not only had a better, much lower power processor, but a better business model – they licensed their architecture to other companies that designed their own products. Today that’s built on the premise that an x86 architecture is the one best suited for big data. Startups are unencumbered by the status quo.

Architecture 227

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.) Their engineers hated us. Engineers as Salesmen I thought (and still do) that this sales guy walked on water.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

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. Hire a CTO or VP Engineering. Just change it.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 18, 2011

and moved from delivery to architecture and developer evangelism to make sure that new hires don't have to have the same bad experiences we all had to go through until companies started appreciating the internet as a platform. QA can look at stuff built just hours before and give feedback by the time the engineers return to work.

Europe 139

Europe India Hiring Engineer 139

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

I was told they werent sure, because all of their engineers were currently busy refactoring. 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.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

I thought a good place to start was with the origins of the idea that "software design" should be considered a discipline in its own right, on par with computer science, software engineering, and computer programming. Great engineers see it and smile. This is called set-based concurrent engineering (SBCE). [1]

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Hearpreneur

JANUARY 5, 2024

2- Involving strategic foresight and adaptability Photo Credit: Brandon Fowler As an engineering expert and owner of Machinist Guides, preparing for an economic downturn involves strategic foresight and adaptability. Thanks to David Reyes, Reyes Financial Architecture ! Thanks to Ben Pu, ShipSage ! #2- Thanks to Hardy Desai, Supple !

Entrepreneur 77

Entrepreneur Architecture Agile Small Business 77

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

Tossing their agile development process and at times their entire business model in the air, the company would go into fire-drill mode and engineering would start working on whatever his latest insight was. Some of the engineers figuring if the founder was declaring they were toast in 90 days were updating their resumes.

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Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 316

Hearpreneur

JANUARY 21, 2017

They do a great job at building an amazing culture, and they are able to keep a small company feel in terms of speed and agility because they keep the teams small and have basically broken the company up into a whole bunch of companies. 11 – US Army Classified as a Computer Engineer. Image Credit: Lori Cheek.

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Entrepreneur Investment Bankers PR Social Media 48