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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.

Agile 111
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Lessons Learned: The product manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, October 5, 2008 The product managers lament Life is not easy when youre working in an old-fashioned waterfall development process, no matter what role you play. The product manager was clearly struggling to get results from the rest of the team. Lets start with what the product manager does.

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Developing Strong Product Owners

SVPG

In my last article I discussed the role of the leader of the product organization. I want every product leader to feel considerable urgency and importance around this need. I want every product leader to feel considerable urgency and importance around this need.

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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: A new version of the Joel Test (draft)

Startup Lessons Learned

I am convinced one of Joel Spolskys lasting contributions to the field of managing software teams will turn out to be the Joel Test , a checklist of 12 essential practices that you could use to rate the effectiveness of a software product development team. He wrote it in 2000, and as far as I know has never updated it.

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Lessons Learned: ScienceDaily: Corporate culture is most important.

Startup Lessons Learned

I believe its important that product teams be cross-functional, no matter what other job function the product champion does. At IMVU , we called this person a Producer (revealing our games background); in Scrum , they are called the Product Owner. about what their function needs to do to fully support the product.

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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage. The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants. Unfortunately, customers hated that initial product.