Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money. Would you mind sharing them?

Silicon Valley 126

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Computer hardware companies were faced with their customers asking for low-cost (relatively) desktop computers they had no experience in building. Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.)

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Unfortunately most startups learn this by going through the “Fire the first Sales VP&# drill: You start your company with a list of potential customers reading like a “who’s who&# of whatever vertical market you’re in (or the Fortune 1000 list.) Your board nods sagely at your target customer list.

Silicon Valley 133

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

The quintessential California couple, they stood out in our crowd as the engineer (in his late 20′s, respected by his peers and the customer) had hair down to his shoulders, sharply contrasting with the military crewcuts of the customers and most of the other contractors.

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

AgileZen – project management visually see and interact with your work Kanbanery – Simple online team or personal kanban board LeanKit Kanban – Great for visualizing work of product development Kanban Pad – “Nice and lean” and free online Kanban tool Banana Scrum – A tool simple as Scrum itself.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Imagine you hear from an engineer that they are worried that a certain payment subsystem is unreliable, and will therefore double-charge some customers. One way to evaluate this fear is to spend time on analysis: how many customers will be affected? To a lot of smart engineers, that sounds crazy.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

In this scheme, all of the data related to a specific feature of a product are stored on the same machines. For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. This type of vertical partitioning sharding scheme wont work in most cases. Key-based partitioning. to store it.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? My blog has over 14000 subscribers, for example. Is that a lot? Is that good? August 24, 2009 2:17 PM Norbert Mocsnik said.

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

And the same time we were also going to do all the other strategic stuff about pricing, positioning, promotion and customer discovery and validation to help engineering understand customer needs. Later on in this same company’s life, sales will become the pointy end and product development moves to a supporting role.

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Software By Rob

JULY 15, 2011

is a tool that helps you edge into customer development. It’s a free tool put together by Sean Ellis and Hiten Shah as a way for product owners to easily survey their customers using pre-written questions. Since the survey was only sent to existing customers, this number blew my mind. Photo by Eleaf.

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