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. He hired an operating exec as the CEO a few years ago. In reality this is a fools choice.

Part-Time VPE 318

Part-Time VPE Agile Engineer Startup 318

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

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2011

Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development , Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a “science,” and anyone could do it. It is a very different skill than science, engineering, or management. George Bernard Shaw.

Agile 332

Agile Customer Development Early Stage Business Model 332

View from Seed

FEBRUARY 27, 2019

Recently, I’ve been working with a few of our portfolio companies to help them think about how to recruit and interview their first analytics hire. Analytics is about designing, reporting, and leveraging operating metrics to aid strategic and functional decision-making. When to make your first analytics hire.

Analytics 149

Analytics Hiring SQL Forecast 149

VC Cafe

AUGUST 2, 2022

On the infrastructure side, Epic owns ‘Unreal Engine’ the second most popular 3D graphic engine, and creator of MetaHumans, a digital twin rendering software that can be used to create hyper realistic characters to ‘populate’ the Metaverse. The largest and most popular 3D engine has big plans for the Metaverse.

IP 206

IP Cofounder Valuation Acquisition 206

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2016

Microsoft left the 20 th century owning over 95% of the operating systems that ran on computers (almost all on desktops). It wasn’t that Microsoft didn’t have smart engineers working on search, media, mobile and cloud. Fifteen years and 2 billion smartphones shipped in the 21 st century and Microsoft’s mobile OS share is 1%.

Azure 120

Azure Business Model Cloud Artificial Inteligence 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2016

Microsoft left the 20 th century owning over 95% of the operating systems that ran on computers (almost all on desktops). It wasn’t that Microsoft didn’t have smart engineers working on search, media, mobile and cloud. Fifteen years and 2 billion smartphones shipped in the 21 st century and Microsoft’s mobile OS share is 1%.

Azure 120

Azure Business Model Cloud Artificial Inteligence 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 19, 2009 Lean hiring tips In preparing for the strategy series panel this week, I have been doing some thinking about costs. And all of that cost was caused by one activity: hiring. Hiring is no different from any other company process. Sounds a little abstract, though, doesnt it?

Lean 140

Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

SVPG

OCTOBER 14, 2014

” I first witnessed this many years ago when I was an engineer for HP, building platform and tool technology products for “the enterprise.” In IT mindset companies, you usually find very slow, heavy, Waterfall processes, even when the engineers consider themselves Agile. I call this problem “IT Mindset.”

Product 91

Product Technical Review Engineer CTO Hire 91

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

The OEM Business Convergent’s business was selling desktop computers (with our own operating system and office applications) to other computer manufacturers – most of them long gone: Burroughs, Prime, Monroe Data Systems, ADP, Mohawk, Gould, NCR, 4-Phase, AT&T. Their engineers hated us. The result wasn’t what I expected.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. So far, I have found "lean startup" works better with the entrepreneurs Ive talked to than "agile startup" or even "extreme startup.") The lean startup is an application of Lean Thinking.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2020

They operated this way because their existing business models didn’t allow them to initially profit from those opportunities – so they ignored them – and continued to chase higher profitability in more-demanding segments. He had introduced the idea that customers don’t buy a product, rather than they hire it for a “job to be done.”

Lean 428

Lean Business Model Government Agile 428

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 21, 2015

Search engine impersonators are bots that pretend to be crawling a website in an attempt to index it and find useful links. Most website owners are more than happy to have the search engine bots (googlebot and bingbot, to name a couple) browsing their website all day long. It is evidence to the agility of DDoS attackers.

Search 100

Search Engineer IP Reputation 100

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. Every time an engineer checks in code, they are batching up a certain amount of work. Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

ConversionXL

MAY 1, 2017

With the pace of innovation increasing, and powerful new tools—such as cloud storage of big data sets and machine learning algorithms for mining that data—now affordable and accessible to even fledgling start-ups, even the most powerful incumbents, such as Walmart and Microsoft, must learn to be more agile in both product development and marketing.

Technical Review 127

Technical Review Algorithm Channel Analytics 127

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. Side-effects that reduce agility are the most damaging symptoms of technical debt.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

The signals are loud and clear : seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. There was no repeatable methodology, startups and their VC’s still operated like startups were simply a smaller version of a large company. Carpe Diem.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

The VP Engineering spends all of his time trying to make sure the programmers understand and implement the spec. Eventually, I hope to get them on a full agile diet, with TDD, scrums, sprints, pair programming, and more. Each iteration takes longer than the previous one. Frustration is mounting. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

Steve Blank

MARCH 5, 2012

It’s at this point the business needs an operating plan, financial forecasts and other well-understood management tools. The processes used to organize and implement the search for the business model are Customer Development and Agile Development. It’s like trying to implement a startup using Waterfall engineering.).

Search 320

Search Business Model Customer Development Agile 320

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Boyd emphasized the importance of agility in combat: "the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than ones opponent." Agile software development. Agile allows companies to build higher quality software faster. This speeds up the Ideas-Code-Data feedback loop.

Lean 102

Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

AUGUST 12, 2021

Leverage the innate agility. Instead, it’s up to the skeleton C-Suite team, already maxed out, to not only formalize operations, but also, continue to invent. Real expertise is expensive and many second stage companies get sticker shock when faced with hiring expertise. Here’s why. That never works. Fractional Trend.

Framework 71

Framework Agile Product Development Hiring 71

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Labels: customer development , search engine marketing 13comments: Jim Lindstrom said. Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Expo SF (May.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

For example, imagine a team operating in a traditional waterfall development system, without continuous deployment, test-driven development, or continuous integration. So we need to find solutions that operate at the systems level to break teams out of this pincer action. Why does it work?

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

You’re Hired, You’re Fired. My first job in Silicon Valley: I was hired as a lab technician at ESL to support the training department. The manager of the training department who hired you wasn’t authorized to do so – and he’s been fired. Could I work here if he wanted to hire me?&#

Agile 245

Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 245

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

At Toyota , they are called Chief Engineer : Toyota realizes that the Chief Engineer job is probably the most important one in the company because the Chief Engineer listens to the customer and then determines what the functions need to do to address the customer’s desires. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 2, 2020

Here’s why: because they take technology that used to be available to engineers only, and make it available to everyone. The no-code movement is one that’s completely revolutionizing the way small- and medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs take their operations and ideas digital, and it’s only just begun.

CTO Hire 264

CTO Hire eCommerce Engineer Software 264

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2010

In management jobs related to operations – that is, the people tasked with actually making and distributing physical products – this kind of thinking is now considered ludicrous, thanks to a century of progress. Probably not; it’s much easier to blame the particular person who made the mistakes. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Management Founder Lean 161

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

MAY 22, 2019

The Benefits of Innovation Training for Operational Employees. Why is it that organizations don’t invest in training operational employees? Companies are investing in innovation training, mostly learning frameworks like Lean, Agile, or Design Thinking. And management of operations is all about control.

Operations 54

Operations Employee Technical Review Agile 54

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. Thanks to Janet Wu, SilkRoll ! #7

Entrepreneur 48

Entrepreneur Investment Bankers PR Social Media 48

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook. Compared to the million-dollar startup, they are operating at micro-scale. Go on an agile diet quickly. With a product development team that is not shipping, any agile methodology will surface major problems quickly. How does that stack up? Great post!

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

MAY 10, 2010

Last week I was having coffee with an ex engineering student of mine now on his second startup (and for a change it wasn’t a Web 2.0 We’re starting to hire senior execs as VP’s and all the jobs specs have “MBA” as a requirement. MBA or Engineering Management ? Agile Development? Engineering Management program?

Engineer 289

Engineer Business Model Programming Finance 289

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

— I just watched a very smart company try to manage innovation by hiring a global consulting firm to offload engineering from “distractions.” This was a very large and established tech company; its engineering organization developed the core day-to-day capabilities of the organization. There’s a much better way.

Incubator 312

Incubator Curation Engineer Government 312

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campa. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

This theory has become so influential that I have called it one of the three pillars of the lean startup - every bit as important as the changes in technology or the advent of agile development. Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campa. Expo SF (May.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

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

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

The second shift in mindset required is to separate the concept of a marketing release from the concept of an engineering release. You can train your operations or customer service staff on how it works - all live in the production environment. Thats good for QA and for engineers. Faster (and better) feedback.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122