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Lessons Learned: Combining agile development with customer development

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customer development Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. In most agile development systems, there is a notion of the "product backlog" a prioritized list of what software is most valuable to be developed next.

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How Private Equity and Venture Capital Investors Are Eating Their Own Dogfood

David Teten

An investor had few hard metrics other than the actual financials, and little technology to make the process scaleable. Over the past few decades, better metrics became available, and investors could take a more analytical, data-driven approach. Why is it now more feasible to use technology in the VC investing process?

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Lessons Learned: The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the time

Startup Lessons Learned

Focus on the output metrics of that part of the product, and you make the problem a lot more clear. I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. Labels: customer development , split-test 7comments: Editor said.

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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

The design failure meant that there was constant thrashing as the servers struggled to provision capacity according to the “elegant&# algorithm we’d designed. Are the engineers in the customer development team allowed to push quick and dirty "prototypes" to production? Eric, great post.

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Lessons Learned: The ABCDEF's of conducting a technical interview

Startup Lessons Learned

For the past couple of years Ive used a question that I once was asked in an interview, in which you have the candidate produce an algorithm for drawing a circle on a pixel grid. As they optimize their solution, they eventually wind up deriving Bresenhams circle algorithm. What is customer development?

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Learning is better than optimization (the local maximum problem)

Startup Lessons Learned

At least, not in the traditional sense of trying to squeeze every tenth of a point out of a conversion metric or landing page. Instead, we try to accelerate with respect to validated learning about customers. Even if it shows improvement in some micro metric, does that invalidate the overall design? No one feature is to blame.

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Lessons Learned: Five Whys

Startup Lessons Learned

Because five whys kept turning up a few key metrics that were hard to set static thresholds for, we even had a dynamic prediction algorithm that would make forecasts based on past data, and fire alerts if the metric ever went out of its normal bounds. What is customer development?