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Lessons Learned: Work in small batches

Startup Lessons Learned

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.

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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.

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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. So the product development team was busy creating lots of split-tests for lots of hypotheses. Each day, the analytics team would share a report with them that had the details of how each test was doing.

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

Startup Lessons Learned

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. What is customer development? Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online.

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Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

Startup Lessons Learned

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. What is customer development? Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online.

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Lessons Learned: Product development leverage

Startup Lessons Learned

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. It allowed me to assess the market demand for that offline product before I had the final product baked.

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Lessons Learned: The engineering manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

Most of the other processs changes - mandatory design reviews (prelimninary, critical, etc), - documenting all our procedures, and so on - were to support those two factors. A project usually has an absolute duration and budget whereas the time and money dedicated to development within the project is where the tradeoffs are made.