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Lessons Learned: Combining agile development with customer development

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customer development Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. In most agile development systems, there is a notion of the "product backlog" a prioritized list of what software is most valuable to be developed next.

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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. 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.

Lean 168
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Lessons Learned: The product manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

These specs are handed to a designer, who builds layouts and mockups of all the salient points. Then the designs are handed to a team of programmers with various specialties. The programmers keep asking for more say in the designs and direction that they work on. First, he writes it nice and clear.

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

Startup Lessons Learned

There are several ways to make progress evident - the Scrum team model is my current favorite. If you have a true cross-functional team, empowered (a la Scrum) to do whatever it takes to succeed its likely they will converge on the result quickly. When its receding, we rescope. Do you have a spec? Do you do hallway usability testing?

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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. Yet there is one silver lining when it does happen: we wind up throwing out working code , debt-riddled and elegantly designed alike.

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Developing Strong Product Owners

SVPG

User Experience Design Knowledge (7) - How knowledgeable is the product owner on the topics of user experience design? Process Skills: Customer Discovery Process (7) - Customer discovery includes customer interviewing skills, opportunity assessments and understanding of customer development programs.

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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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.