Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. Every time an engineer checks in code, they are batching up a certain amount of work. Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations.

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San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process. Less is more.

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Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

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

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.

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Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

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

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Labels: customer development , search engine marketing 13comments: Jim Lindstrom said. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? If you cant find any , maybe that means you havent figured out who your customer is yet.

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Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

Its even more critical in lean startups when they need to manage growth. Thus the power of the Chief Engineer is very large even though he (and they are all men so far) has no direct reports other than a secretary and a few assistants who are themselves being trained to be chief engineers. Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Id like to talk about a technique Ive used to help manage this growth without slowing down. Managers in this area have to take a portfolio approach, promoting ideas that work and might make good candidates for further investment. That means they are continuously getting better and better at automating and driving out waste.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0,

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Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

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.

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Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

When creating a new market, expect to spend as long as two years before you manage to get traction with early customers, but enjoy the utter lack of competition. I am continuously coaching people to get out and see what is really going on. Tom Peters called the Management By Walking Around - MBWA. What kind of market are you in?

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

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.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

these devices all need human instruction to enable correct and desired operation. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0, Expo (and a call for he.

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Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

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. Compared to the million-dollar startup, they are operating at micro-scale. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

PayPal, under the leadership of David Marcus and Bill Scott, re-defining and re-engineering itself by embracing Lean Startup to improve the product experience. My personal background was as an engineer and my companies had been Web-based startups, so that is what I wrote about. Plenty of venture capitalists advised me against it.

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Lean Entrepreneur Agile San Francisco 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Heres a representative view from an actual Amazon customer review : We all know how to operate our own entertainment center, but what happens when you have to explain it to your babysitter, mother-in-law, or your wife? Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Before this remote, I had a Sony RM-AV3000.

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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.

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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." Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? And, as the commenter rightly points out, this is not really a matter of efficiency.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 121

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

Finding great engineers is hard; figuring out whos good is even harder. Balancing competing objectives is a recurring theme on this blog - its the central challenge of all management decisions. For software engineers, I think this absolutely has to be a programming problem solved on a whiteboard. Communication.

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San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

For those who hunger for a rigorous approach to managing product development, Donald Reinertsens book is epic. Reinertsen weaves together ideas from lean manufacturing, maneuver warfare, queuing theory, and even the architecture of computer operating systems and the Internet. Managing timelines instead of queues. Inflexibility.

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

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. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Audio 167

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

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

Should you focus on brand managers or agency buyers? Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica.

Advertising 60

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

Im Community Manager at VenCorps, co-host of commandN. FYI the surveymonkey link isnt operational. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Either way, Ive been a happy subscriber ever since. Hi Eric, Will Pate here.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 60

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. Thats understandable - its embarrassing!

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0,

Silicon Valley 68

Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 68

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)? But they are often counter-productive when placed in a management role for other kinds of work.

San Francisco 79

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. My manager, part of the QA group, gave me a tour of a site and we entered a huge depressing warehouse stacked full with cubes. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Software Review 136

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 6, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, December 6, 2008 The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part three Those startups that manage to build a product people want have to deal with the consequences of that success. And still being a startup means continuing to innovate as well as keep the lights on.

San Francisco 74

San Francisco SCRUM Lean Continuous Deployment 74

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

Policy makers need to know: regulations designed to manage big-companies actually protect those companies by stifling innovation (and competition) from startups. The US is headed to be a second rate or third rate power if policy isn't changed to permit new and ground breaking applications to operate in large networks.

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DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

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. In other words, we committed the one cardinal sin of community management.

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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. And in MMOs, of course, it was a fiction-derived term for parallel servers which has managed to stick (many people refer to parallel VW servers as "shards" now). You need to store two kinds of information.

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

Here your challenge is to convince that manager that you really can do the job at such low cost. Twenty years from now, operating systems might also work as a good metaphor. However, attempting to slot a market stereotype matrix on to the environment in which your start-up operates isnt always going to be particularly fruitful.

San Francisco 89

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

At IMVU, when wed hire a new engineer, we could get them to ship code to production on their first day, even if they had never programmed in PHP before. But I think debates about which language, which operating system, even which editor (emacs, vim, Visual Studio) can go on forever. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

PHP 166

PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 20, 2009

They started building BASIC interpreters, but evolved into the worlds largest operating systems monopoly. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? They started out as digital cash for PDAs, but evolved into online payments for eBay.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 68