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Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

Startup Lessons Learned

Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers. In order to do this, we have our customer development team work hard to find a market, any market, for the product as currently specified. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. This is a common mistake.

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Lessons Learned: Product development leverage

Startup Lessons Learned

The idea of leverage is simple: for every ounce of effort your product development team puts into your product, find ways to magnify that effort by getting many other people to invest along with you. It allowed me to assess the market demand for that offline product before I had the final product baked.

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Lessons Learned: The engineering manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

Debugging problems with the dev environment itself is a common form of waste that this practice eliminates. A new employee is more likely to make a mistake than an experienced one, but everyone makes mistakes. The PMs relationship to quality is a step removed from the development team that is directly affected by the quality every day.

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Lean Startup at Scale

Startup Lessons Learned

But we couldn''t have identified this without having clear metrics (that high bug count) to assess our development process. As Shutterstock has grown, there are a few key elements to our continued development speed: Small, autonomous teams: The more a team can do on their own, the faster they can go.

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

Startup Lessons Learned

On the one hand, it gives you insight into what kind of employee the candidate might be. 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.

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Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

Sometimes, a great hacker has the potential to grow into the CTO of a company, and in those cases all you need is an outside mentor who can work with them to develop those skills. At the end of the day, the product development team of a startup (large or small) is a service organization.