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. This is precisely the dilemma that the doctrine of minimum viable product is designed to solve.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Examples of this are well-known, and (in my definition) include any product that causes new customers to sign up as a necessary side-effect of existing customers normal usage: Facebook, Myspace, AIM/ICQ, Hotmail, Paypal. For Neopets, its simply a side-effect of their game-like product design.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2010

And that narrow definition of entrepreneurship doesn’t count all of the managers inside established companies who are effectively engaged in the same process of building an internal startup (see What is a startup? for my more expansive definition). for my more expansive definition). What motivates all these entrepreneurs?

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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. But lean startups cant afford to be satisfied with just that definition, because there are situations where working code is itself a form of waste.

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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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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 29, 2013

The Lean Startup Conference is an event by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs—except that our definition of “entrepreneur” may be different from the one you have in mind. Eric has talked often about recognizing a startup as an organization designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

Inspiring ideas: real-time biz metrics; safe continuous deployment; A/B split testing. And one last specific practice that came up at this session: feverishaaron : UI, design and programmers are all in the same department, all have the same title, and all are evaluated the same. Articulate, inspirational.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 3, 2009

Yet, I think this definition is too important to leave out. If your practice is not designed to cope with uncertainty, it has no place in a startup - even if your startup is located in government or enterprise. ericries #leanstartup Another new idea in the section on continuous deployment and the cluster immune system.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

So instead of having sales, marketing, and business development, we have a problem team implementing customer development. And instead of design, engineering, QA, and operations we have a solution team implementing a startup-centric version of agile development. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

Definitely interested in the perspective of the open-source contributor solicited with a job offer. Im definitely curious about your thoughts on how to present the company right. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Labels: hiring 4comments: deskin said. Excellent post all around. Thats some awesome advice.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Apple has a track record of creating lots of interesting enabling infrastructure, like Quicktime and Bonjour, which sometimes become key to their products and othertimes not. My guess is they have lots of people constantly working on interesting new tools for their designers to play with. Will start to pay attention. Great post Eric.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

I had a lot of use for this concept back when I worked on game design and virtual worlds. In order to maintain game play balance, game designers have to take into account the needs of customers who have an excess of four different assets: time , money , skill , and passion. Having a balanced ecosystem is what game designers strive for.

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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. I think where we get into trouble is we have many definitions of quality.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

You can learn about customer development, and quite a bit more, in Steves book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. This is a self-published book, originally designed as a companion to Steves class at Berkeleys Haas school of business. Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. Your comment about the Innovation/R&D phase that it's hard to predict has definitely proven true in my experience. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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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. Still, a startup product development team is a service organization. Labels: hiring , product development 5comments: TedHoward said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 28, 2008

Now there was nothing wrong with their analysis: anyone who invents a technology as sophisticated as The Transformers is definitely going to make a lot of money. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. They even included a slide with The Transformers on it. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

Unfortunately, most decisions that confront startups lack a definitive right answer. Sometimes an early negative result from an experiment is a harbinger of doom for that product, and means it should be abandoned. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

As a last disclaimer, please consult the definition of the word hacker if youre not familiar with the controversies surrounding that term.) Even if, in a previous life, you were a world expert in some functional specialty, like in-depth market research or scalable systems design, the compressed timeline of a startup makes it irrelevant.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

Because, unless you are working in an extremely static environment, your product development team is learning and getting better all the time. Most importantly, I encouraged the leaders of the company to bring awareness of the business challenges to the product development team. Great post, Eric. Balance is important.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2009

Their old product prioritization meetings may have been a battle of opinions, but at least they understood what was going on. Now they first had to go through a ritual that involved complex math, reached no definite outcome, and then proceeded to have a battle of opinions anyway! Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 14, 2009

I would definitely be interested any scholarship opportunities that might be made available. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ▼ 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica. Cash is tight.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

Youll notice a pattern: most of the key features that enabled PHPs success are considered among its defects by experts in language design. Ironically, as PHP has grown up, its designers have been busy "fixing" these shortcomings. I can design with my brain coming first - the way I like it. will make the foundation weak.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

So let’s turn our attention from what may happen in the future to what is definitely happening in the present. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Is that a lot? Is that good?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 21, 2010

So let’s begin with a definition of a startup that captures its essential nature, and tries to leave behind the specific associations of the most famous startups. A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Wrong again.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 21, 2008

Basically, the definition of waste is different when you know less about your customer. My answer to the comment went like this: Efficiency is a by-product of removing waste. Toyota employs something called "set-based product development" where they develop multiple versions of a product at once.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 19, 2009

By definition these 10,000 founders wouldnt be taking jobs from Americans: it could be part of the terms of the visa that they couldnt work for existing companies, only new ones theyd founded. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. They wouldnt all grow as big as Google, but out of 2500 some would come close.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Or it might mean selling a few products on a site like eBay to see how well they perform before ordering in bulk from a wholesaler. What sets this approach apart from practices like using focus groups is that companies base product development decisions not just on what customers say they want but on how they vote with their wallets.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

My point is that this article does not contain the kind of information we’d need to draw reasonable inferences, which is by design. I choose the “preceding month&# definition in order to give us a sense for individual people’s behavior. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

(a guide for hackers) (This post was inspired by a conversation with Nivi from Venture Hacks , but is otherwise not his fault) There has been a proliferation of frameworks and metaphors lately that are designed to help startups avoid the all-too-common fatal mistake of failing to find a market. 4comments: Sean Murphy said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2009

Given the time constraints, I organized my presentation around two simple ideas: STARTUP = EXPERIMENT FASTER STARTUPS = MORE EXPERIMENTS PER DOLLAR I tried to make clear my usual definition of a startup, one that has nothing to do with size of company or sector of the economy. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2009

Eric) We made a few pencil drawings of what the app would look like which we then gave to a graphic designer. With that, the graphic designer created a Photoshop image. BUT it definitely does NOT have the super-duper-hyper-ultra-cool Web 2.0 It definitely explores ethical boundaries. It is borderline embarrassing.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

I definitely subscribe to the idea of "it's on our roadmap, but we'll move it up in priority thanks to you" I even make a note of specific people who've requested a feature or reported a bug, and then personally let them know when it's been implemented or resolved. I still consider it sometimes.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2009

Heres the working definition Ive started using: A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. In a future post, Ill attempt to unpack this definition in detail. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

Doing in-depth customer research, with long questionnaires with detailed demographic and psychograpic breakdowns, is very helpful for long-range planning, interaction design and, most importantly, creating customer archetypes. Designing the survey The NPS question itself (again, "How likely are you to recommend X to a friend or colleague?")

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 31, 2009

I'm finding many people coming to me with jobs, not to offer to me necessarily, but to say, "hey do you know any good designer/engineer/product person looking for a new opportunity?" I'll definitely try this out. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

And speaking of Facebook, I definitely didnt think it was a good idea when I first heard about it. Definitely one of the best posts from you. All my products and ideas focus on early cash and a business model that works from the first day. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. And Google?

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