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Case Study: Lean UX at work

Startup Lessons Learned

This article is a guest post by Jeff Gothelf, Director of User Experience at TheLadders in New York City. Jeff will also be joining us on stage at Startup Lessons Learned 2011 , where he will be presenting a case study on his experience blending design, Lean Startup, and large company culture.

Lean 165
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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: 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: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

I would add -- think of your development and running your business like a PM/Developer uses Agile or Scrum in software development. The wise entrepreneur will take this advice seriously in order to distill his ideas down to their essence. No more, no less. September 15, 2008 9:19 PM James said. April 27, 2009 8:59 AM Anonymoussaid.

Lean 168
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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. I think the new question needs to be "does the team have a clear objective?" 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.

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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. 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.

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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. Expo New York New York, NY Nov 19 The Lean Startup at MIT Boston, MA Nov 20 Lunch workshop at Dogpatch Labs Boston, MA Dec 17 Lean Startup Cohort program begins San Francisco, CA KISSmetrics KISSmetrics is loading.