Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Market Risk vs. Invention Risk - Click to Enlarge For companies building web-based products, product development may be difficult, but with enough time and iteration engineering will eventually converge on a solution and ship a functional product - i t’s engineering, not invention.

Vertical 147

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 147

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

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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

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

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. And that’s where the problem was. he’d declare. “We

Founder 317

Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 317

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

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

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. Thats good for QA and for engineers. Faster (and better) feedback.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Both sides start to think of their point of view in moralistic terms: “those guys don’t see the economic value of fast action, they only care about their precious architecture diagrams&# or “those guys are sloppy and have no professional pride.&# Another is used by marketing to refer to what customers see.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 22, 2008 Thoughts on scientific product development I enjoyed reading a post today from Laserlike (Mike Speiser), on Scientific product development. I agree with the less is more product development approach, but for a different reason. Now that is fun.

Product Development 68

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 68

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

Finding great engineers is hard; figuring out whos good is even harder. 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. I have found this quite rare in engineers. At the time, I was a die-heard Java zealot.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

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

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.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Our bias as technologists is to over-focus on the product part of the problem, and five whys tends to counteract that tendency. 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.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

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

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?

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

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

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

The best composition is probably one engineer whose passion lies in the pixels on the screen and another engineer whose passion is making bits fly really fast through servers. andrew chen great advice and really straight to the point – make a great product, focus on that and everything else will come. Sorry, folks.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

He , Srikanth Narayan , Ben Werdmuller von Elgg , Jo Vi Ko , Justin Lee , Giovanni Tardini , David de Weerdt , Vineet Thanedar , Ryan Brideau , Jonathan Meiri , Rob Weedn , Krzysztof Kowalczyk , Greg Pilling , Kevin Leland , Parham Michael Ossareh , Dan Loewenherz , Mary Specht , Engin Erdo?an "I am a creative guy with a startup idea."

Developer 42

Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder 42

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. We can skip the chasm.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

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