Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, February 11, 2009 The free software hiring advantage This is one of those startup tips Im a little reluctant to share, because its been such a powerful source of competitive advantage in the companies Ive worked with. Especially for a startup, not taking maximum advantage of free software is crazy.

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Software Review Software Hiring San Francisco 68

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 8, 2009 Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and whats changed since then) My recent article on technical debt and its positive uses generated a fair bit of controversy. The same might be said of good software. Here we have the beginnings of a theory of design for software.

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Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 15, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, July 15, 2010 Some IPO speculation Inspired by Steve Blank’s post today about the “lost decade&# of IPO’s , I’d like to make some predictions. The fact that IPO’s are disappearing makes intuitive sense to me. Let me be clear: Steve is the historian.

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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. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. The lean startup is an application of Lean Thinking.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

In addition to presenting the IMVU case, we tried for the first time to do an overview of a software engineering methodology that integrates practices from agile software development with Steves method of Customer Development. Can this methodology be used for startups that are not exclusively about software?

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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.

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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. They just assumed it was the way software companies worked. Sound good?

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Refreshing to finally see lean and agile thinking emerge in product/business-floors and not only in technology. Critical also, as the lean company/start-up can not be lean by just using lean principles in IT and not in Product Development/Management - a common misinterpretation of the Toyota Production System.

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San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

I am convinced one of Joel Spolskys lasting contributions to the field of managing software teams will turn out to be the Joel Test , a checklist of 12 essential practices that you could use to rate the effectiveness of a software product development team. Please leave feedback!) Can you make a build in one step?

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Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

This builds on a lot of great thinking that has come before, like the agile movements insistence that only the creation of working code counts as progress for a software development team. None of it would have happened if we had plenty of cash, or were content to count our progress by traffic or product development milestones.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 98

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2009

For those whove heard it, it contains a length discourse on the subject of agile software development and extreme programming, including its weaknesses when applied to startups. As Im pontificating about agile, I see the name Kent Beck in my peripheral vision. There is a dark side to naming.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, February 20, 2009 Work in small batches Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches. I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. For software, the easiest batch to see is code. This is easiest to see in deployment.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

You cant make these global efficiency improvements until you get clear about the goal of your development process. That leads to a seemingly-obvious question: what is progress in software development? Heck, thats what it says right there in the agile manifesto. I am not a developer. If it didnt, wed trash it.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 30, 2009

I thought Id share a little bit of that, too: I’ve been interested in different approaches to software development going back to 1987 when – in my first company Feld Technologies – my partner Dave Jilk and I started talking about “semi-custom software development&# (way ahead of its time).

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

Its inspired by the classic OODA Loop and is really just a simplified version of that concept, applied specifically to creating a software product development team. There are three stages: We start with ideas about what our product could be. Were a software company, so what we do everyday is turn ideas into code.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 142

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

So the product manager winds up actually having to use the software, by hand, updating the spec and helping create a new test plan. Eventually, I hope to get them on a full agile diet, with TDD, scrums, sprints, pair programming, and more. Labels: product development 8comments: Vincent van Wylick said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content. I know many people who think that software works like magic, but to me it actually was magic. Expo SF (May.

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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. 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

FEBRUARY 9, 2009

It uses principles of agile software development, open source and web 2.0, Hey Someone else who is extending the agile/lean approach beyond just developing software. Hey Someone else who is extending the agile/lean approach beyond just developing software. Check out what I am doing at.

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Lean San Francisco Web Advisory Board 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

It became harder and harder to separate how the software is built from how the software is structured. If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? If not, whos going to insist we switch to free and open source software? I dont think so.

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CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? When we build products, we use a methodology. For software, we have many - you can enjoy a nice long list on Wikipedia. You can learn about customer development, and quite a bit more, in Steves book The Four Steps to the Epiphany.

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 1, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 1, 2008 Test-Driven Development as andon cord You cannot control what you cannot see, and the hardest part of managing software projects is that the final product is so intangible. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2010

Kent Beck is deservedly famous for his many contributions in the software industry. Kent Beck is deservedly famous for his many contributions in the software industry. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Of course ideas have to evolve and change. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 133

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

One of the sayings I hear from talented managers in product development is, “good enough never is.&# And, most importantly, it helps team members develop the courage to stand up for these values in stressful situations. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Of all the tactics I have advocated as part of the lean startup , none has provoked as many extreme reactions as continuous deployment , a process that allows companies to release software in minutes instead of days, weeks, or months. One is used by engineers to refer to the process of getting code fully integrated into production.

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 2, 2008 On deployment My favorite question to ask a software development team is "how do you do a release." How long does the software sit un-deployed? Software is generally always getting better or getting worse. How fast do they iterate? Does it require weeks of QA?

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customer development , the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop , and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience. Creating a company-wide feedback loop that incorporates both customer development and agile development is a challenge.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Also SJ's obsession with better taste (positively) contributes to the overall product development process. There are some good anecdotes about Chief Engineers in the Toyota Product Development Book. Apple's first hit product was Apple II, which came after I. Will start to pay attention. Great post Eric.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Or, phrased more hopefully, "I see how you can use continuous deployment to run an online consumer service, but how can it be used for B2B software?" That continuous deployment leads to lower quality software than software built in large batches. Or variations thereof. Implicit in these concerns are two beliefs: 1.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

Thank you @ericries for drastically altering my perception of agile startup Thank you all so much for your kind words. More recently it's skewed to software & web. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and what.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

I believe it is a full, company-wide turn through the OODA loop (for a software business, see especially Ideas-Code-Learn ). Customer Development : a disciplined approach to finding out if there is a market for your product before its too late. Combining agile development with customer developm. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

This case presents a further complication: desktop software. Without being able transparently modify the software in situ, is it still possible to deploy on a continuous basis? Continuous Deployment is a process by which software is released several times throughout the day – in minutes versus days, weeks, or months.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Wiki 151

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 17, 2009

Although Im not a developer, I am captivated by the lean and agile start-up model that you write about. I plan to apply these models to my own ventures, especially within new contexts separate from software and web development. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Best of luck, Your Software." (OK, If a bad change got to production, wed have a built-in set of questions to ask: why didnt the automated tests catch it? Wed never heard of five whys, and we had plenty of "agile skeptics" on the team. I picked up on the 5 whys from Joel on Software earlier this year. Good stuff.

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Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167