Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 21, 2013

Also among the new speakers is Keya Dannenbaum, founder and CEO of ElectNext. We saw “sophisticated” operations using Google Alerts. Tomorrow, October 22, we’ve got a webcast on Lean Startup for Growing Companies with Wyatt Jenkins, VP of product at Shutterstock, Ari Gesher, senior engineer at Palantir, and Eric.

Lean 152

Lean Startup Metrics Silicon Valley 152

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile : "Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective. They work hard to keep their house in order at all times, and there are strict rules and guidelines in place that prevent engineers and teams from doing things their own way.

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Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

The VP Engineering spends all of his time trying to make sure the programmers understand and implement the spec. Indeed the first thing I thought when I read the first paragraphs that the product manager was operating in a white tower and that the developers felt disenfranchised. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 29, 2013

But that’s not to say that every established company developing personal grooming products is operating risk-free. Often, in very young organizations, those people are simply the founders. So if you’ve got advice to share on implementing a continuous deployment framework, for example, we’re all eyes. in ten years?

Lean 165

Lean Technical Review Startup Software Review 165

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design. The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. Lean vs. debt In the world of physical goods, the leaner a supply chain is, the less debt is required to operate it.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Labels: customer development , search engine marketing 13comments: Jim Lindstrom said. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

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]

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Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

For example, lets say you dont have an operations team, and so youre still getting paged late at night when servers crash. Is it time to make your first operations hire? Returning to our example of the beleaguered founder who still has the pager, before hiring an operations guy, try promoting someone from within to take on the job.

Lean 140

Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Instead, we do everything possible to validate the founders belief. Most people cant sustain more than a few of these iterations, and the founders rarely get to be involved in the later tries. 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.

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

At Toyota , they are called Chief Engineer : Toyota realizes that the Chief Engineer job is probably the most important one in the company because the Chief Engineer listens to the customer and then determines what the functions need to do to address the customer’s desires. Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook. These founders have not managed, to borrow a phrase from Steve Blank , to create a scalable and repeatable sales process.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Some companies and founders refuse to serve existing customers, and are always lurching from one great idea to the next. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

these devices all need human instruction to enable correct and desired operation. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Programming 143

Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

That’s why we have operations alerts trigger a page, but it can also work for other customer events. This is true for split-testing features, but it’s also true for marketing programs or even operations changes. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. In general, avoid make big all-at-once changes.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

Kent Beck of Facebook will give a talk and lead a discussion on how engineers in particular can simultaneously experiment and execute in companies that have enough success they now need to do both. John Goulah will show you how Etsy gets engineers on board with continuous deployment, an important technical environment that many resist.

Lean 166

Lean Early Stage San Francisco Cofounder 166

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Thanks to those of you who were willing to fill out the survey, I learned my net promoter score (about 25) as well as some clear other segmentation insights: about 80% of you are founders of or work at a startup, you read many of the same other blogs, and many of you would like to engage with Lessons Learned in formats and venues beyond this blog.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

I spent some time with his company before the conference and discussed ways to get started with continuous deployment , including my experience introducing it at IMVU. Moreover, approaching the problem from the direction that I had intuitively is a recipe for never reaching a point where continuous deployment is feasible.

Continuous Deployment 131

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 131

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 21, 2008

Lean startups operate by a different standard. Lean startups operate by a different standard." ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Thanks for the response.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 121

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 23, 2009

Pretty soon you’re chasing your own tail a little bit because you’re not operating against a clear, long-term vision of what you’re trying to accomplish. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you?

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Audio 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

Finding great engineers is hard; figuring out whos good is even harder. For software engineers, I think this absolutely has to be a programming problem solved on a whiteboard. I have found this quite rare in engineers. Many of us engineers are strong introverts, without fantastic people skills.

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San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Hes a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD So far, this isnt much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. Its why, at my previous job, we were able to get a new engineer completely productive on their first day. How do you get started with five whys?

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

Reinertsen weaves together ideas from lean manufacturing, maneuver warfare, queuing theory, and even the architecture of computer operating systems and the Internet. If we showed the Toyota Production System to an Internet protocol engineer, it is likely that he would remark, "That is a tail-dropping FIFO queue. What will this do?

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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Advertising San Francisco Media Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

No engineering team. But where it makes sense, that team may also include engineers building new experiments or prototypes to try with customers. And instead of design, engineering, QA, and operations we have a solution team implementing a startup-centric version of agile development. This is my take on that idea.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

FYI the surveymonkey link isnt operational. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Thanks for letting me know.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

I’ve seen many times what happens when a single department get’s holed-up in its own space, like the terrifying “ operations cave.&# Engineers are offenders in this category too, but so is any gender-segregated activity, like an all-female PR or marketing team. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

For example, should we invest a week of engineering time into making our website more failure-proof (which were pretty sure will pay off right away) or into experimenting with a new technology (that might pay off in months, years, or never)? Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Lets get to the answers.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

Maybe operations has changed the OS configuration in production in a way that is incompatible with some developers change. Theoretically, i can visualize the Continuous Integration as RAD ( Rapid action development) along with iterative method, which we used to study in Software Engineering's Process model.

Software Review 136

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

Eric, I wrote up the outline for a government program to promote entrepreneurship I call the "Civilian Innovation Corps" This would be a program supported jointly by government and private investors and would immediately jumpstart the innovation engine in this country. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 6, 2008

When youve mastered that, consider adding operations, customer service, marketing, product management, business development - the idea is that when the team needs to get approval or support from another department, they already have an "insider" who can make it happen. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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San Francisco SCRUM Lean Continuous Deployment 74

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 22, 2008 Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to measure customer satisfaction Ive mentioned Net Promoter Score (NPS) in a few previous posts, but havent had a chance to describe it in detail yet. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Im talking about the actual data-fetching operation. This information is normally maintained by your operations team. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Companies want the coverage, but they don’t actually want to reveal anything useful about their operations. Companies want the coverage, but they don’t actually want to reveal anything useful about their operations. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. The solution? Vanity metrics. The solution?

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Metrics Lean PR 154

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

Having worked with dozens of founders over the past few months, I think I can safely say, without naming any names, that most of us are not too clear on what were talking about when it comes to markets. Founders are constantly being barraged by incoherent and contradictory advice. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 20, 2009

Heres an excerpt: Read the stories of successful startups and, if the founders are willing to be honest, you will see this pattern over and over again. They started building BASIC interpreters, but evolved into the worlds largest operating systems monopoly. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 68