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Lessons Learned: Combining agile development with customer development

Startup Lessons Learned

XP and Scrum don’t have much to say - they punt. If you look at the origins of most agile systems, including Scrum and XP , they come out of experiences in big companies. Both Scrum and XP had a role which you could happily call by the modern title "Product Manager". Embedded in that assumption is why startups fail.

Agile 111
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Lessons Learned: A new version of the Joel Test (draft)

Startup Lessons Learned

If you want to do continuous deployment, youd better be able to certify that build too, which brings us to. Daily builds are giving way to true continuous integration, in which every checkin to the source control system is automatically run against the full battery of automated tests. Do you make daily builds?

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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

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. I would add -- think of your development and running your business like a PM/Developer uses Agile or Scrum in software development. No more, no less.

Lean 168
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Lessons Learned: The product manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

The VP Engineering spends all of his time trying to make sure the programmers understand and implement the spec. Eventually, I hope to get them on a full agile diet, with TDD, scrums, sprints, pair programming, and more. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Each iteration takes longer than the previous one.

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Lessons Learned: ScienceDaily: Corporate culture is most important.

Startup Lessons Learned

At IMVU , we called this person a Producer (revealing our games background); in Scrum , they are called the Product Owner. 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.

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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

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. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future. One last thought.

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Continuous Discovery

SVPG

Quite a few teams now are taking this principle to its logical conclusion and releasing continuously (known as continuous deployment). Even short of moving to Kanban, I have found many Scrum teams that have adapted Scrum in a Kanban direction for exactly this reason.

SCRUM 63