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Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way.

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Lessons Learned: Work in small batches

Startup Lessons Learned

I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process. Take the example of a design team prepping mock-ups for their development team. I dont think so.

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Lessons Learned: The product manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

I met one recently that is working on a really innovative product, and the stories I heard from their development team made me want to cringe. The product manager was clearly struggling to get results from the rest of the team. Labels: product development 8comments: Vincent van Wylick said. Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

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Lessons Learned: The four kinds of work, and how to get them done.

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, November 17, 2008 The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part one Ive written before about some of the advantages startups have when they are very small, like the benefits of having a pathetically small number of customers. Talking to potential customers and competitors customers.

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Datablindness

Startup Lessons Learned

You constantly assess the situation, looking for hazards and timing your movements carefully to get across safely. Because of the extreme unknowns inherent in startup situations, we are all blind – to the realities of what customers what, market dynamics, and competitive threats. Imagine you are crossing the street.

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Lessons Learned: The engineering manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

He has a good team, and theyve shipped a working product to many customers. Hes working harder than ever, and so is his team. But they are pushing for the things that matter to customers - features. So they insist on having the final say on when a feature is "done" enough to show to customers. Thats a bug.

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Lessons Learned: Product development leverage

Startup Lessons Learned

Its a key lean startup concept. The idea of leverage is simple: for every ounce of effort your product development team puts into your product, find ways to magnify that effort by getting many other people to invest along with you. For example, I recently created a customer validation exercise around the Lean Startup Workshop.