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

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

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. Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

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

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.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

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. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. We’re building the wrong product!”

Founder 316

Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 316

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. Customer data is normally partitioned according to customer id.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

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

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. and going into a long diatribe about how insecure the ActiveX architecture was compared to Javas pristine sandbox. what happens if we have a pipelined architecture?

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

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

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

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

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

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

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

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

" Web Development Startups Solo Founders I am a creative guy with a startup idea. Where is the best place to find a rockstar developer to bring it to life? " => I have not bothered to put up a landing page, survey to test customer demand, or done any customer development whatsoever. Rockstar v.

Developer 42

Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder 42

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

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

Lets start with a distinction between shipping new software to the customer, and changing the customers experience. The idea is that often you can change the customers experience without shipping them new software at all. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? September 10, 2009 4:37 AM Dale B.

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

Like I said, forget everything else and just get your product out the door. Inevitably, the excuses begin: I need to hire people to build the product. I don’t know any developers. How do you know which designer/developer to choose? I need money for the servers. Looking forward to reading your next post!

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 10, 2012

“ There are no facts inside your building, so get outside ,” is one of the mantras of Steve Blank , the father of customer development and author of The Startup Owner’s Manual. Use it for your product development (and for deciding what to sell in the first place). Talk to people.

Audience 122

Audience Analytics B2B eCommerce 122