Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Take the example of a design team prepping mock-ups for their development team. Give the dev team your very first sketches and let them get started. And over time, the development team may be able to start anticipating your needs. That frees up even more development resources, and so on.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

SoCal CTO

FEBRUARY 13, 2013

I did a presentation this week at Coloft that looked at how Non-Technical Founders can go about getting their MVP built. Even with these, you will have paper-tested your MVP, but the reality is that customers will not be able to assess the value to them until they actually use it. To prove/disprove a hypothesis.

Technical Cofounder 338

Technical Cofounder Technical Review CTO Hire Fractional CTO 338

rapidrollout.wordpress.com

JANUARY 15, 2011

Who Uses a Consulting CTO I’m going to focus on the needs of the founders of startup companies: Founders of startups use a consulting CTO when they have business vision but limited knowledge of the technology needed to launch their company. Investors use a consulting CTO for technical due diligence.

Fractional CTO 40

Fractional CTO CTO CTO Hire Fractional VPE 40

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

He shows how the actions of people inside traditional systems are motivated by their rational assessment of their own economics. Reinertsen does not speak about startups specifically - his book is meant to speak broadly to product development teams across industries and sectors. Wow, great review!

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

You constantly assess the situation, looking for hazards and timing your movements carefully to get across safely. I suddenly lose my ability to judge if our marketing programs are being effective. So the product development team was busy creating lots of split-tests for lots of hypotheses. Use pilot programs.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

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. one more thought, where were the code reviews? for Harvard Business Revie.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

If done right, a programming interview serves two purposes simultaneously. The technical interview is at the heart of these challenges when building a product development team, and so I thought it deserved an entire post on its own. Still, a startup product development team is a service organization.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers. In order to do this, we have our customer development team work hard to find a market, any market, for the product as currently specified. Instead, we do everything possible to validate the founders belief.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Now its time to start to think seriously about how to find a repeatable and scalable sales process, how to position and market the product, and how to build a product development team that can turn an early product into a Whole Product. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

TDD plus continuous integration works as a natural feedback loop: if the team is working "too fast" to produce quality code reliably, tests fail, which requires the team to slow down and fix them. Use pair programming and collective code ownership. Pair programming is the most radical, but also the most helpful.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

sivers.org

JUNE 25, 2010

They log in to translate the documents, one at a time, marking each finished when done, which sends the file back to the company for review.” Also important: Only go for providers who have great reviews from many past customers. Decline bids from providers without many great reviews. The translator rejects or approves.

CTO Hire 84

CTO Hire Hiring Software Review Technical Review 84

Seeing Both Sides

SEPTEMBER 15, 2015

This post was co-authored with Omri Stern and originally appeared in Harvard Business Review. The founders have started companies before. In the old model of Israeli startups, many Israeli executive teams would hire a vice president of sales in the U.S. More recently, Israeli founders are themselves moving to the U.S.

Cofounder 20

Cofounder Technical Review United States 20

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

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. That engine of creativity has led to a catalog of something like 2 million virtual goods authored by a hundred thousand developers.

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

blog.expensify.com

APRIL 24, 2012

But it will definitely raise questions during the phone screen, for reasons that are best explained by simile: Programming with.NET is like cooking in a McDonalds kitchen. My example: I have mainly programmed _by choice_ in Python, Ruby, Scala, Haskell, C# and currently I’m doing Java. It’s so blinded, it’s shocking.

Java 107

Java PHP Software Review Coder 107

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

When I was working my first programming jobs, I was introduced to the following maxim: "time, quality, money - pick two." As I evolved my thinking, I started to frame the problem this way: How can we devise a product development process that allows the business leaders to take responsibility for the outcome by making conscious trade-offs?

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

www.readwriteweb.com

OCTOBER 7, 2007

Your actual business plan should be in a lot more detail than Guy describes in his post – his rules relate only to how the results of your work should be presented, not how the content should be derived. These serve to ensure that everyone who ends up on the development team knows what the system is for.

Web 40

Web AJAX Software Review Development Team Review 40