Occam's Razor

APRIL 23, 2012

While there is a great deal of appreciation for the power of metrics/data, I've come to realize that Sr. Leaders don't quite appreciate the deep, and often corrosive, consequences of choosing metric x over metric y as a key performance indicator (KPI). It is a standard metric. Don't believe me?

Metrics 152

Metrics Analytics Search Channel 152

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp 2008, London) This presentation should be required reading for anyone creating a startup with an online service component. He also has a discussion of how your choice of business model determines which of these metric areas you want to focus on. Choose one.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

David Cohen

NOVEMBER 15, 2012

This year we had 220 alumni founders in Boston for the annual gathering, which culminated in a demo day with entrepreneurs from the Boston TechStars program. Hyatt, founder of Conduit Labs , gave a talk on Tuesday entitled “Off The Record,” about the predictive approach to product development.

Boston 83

Boston Cofounder Software Engineering Acquisition 83

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Unfortunately, positioning our product as an "IM add-on" was a complete mistake.

Customer Development 131

Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 19, 2017

In decentralized (or “embedded”) teams, optimization responsibilities are distributed amongst employees under many different umbrellas within the organization, rather than one department. The metrics aren’t the same and neither are the strategies…they all need to be aligned to create a consistent user experience.”. Image Source.

Chad 90

Chad Analytics Technical Review Framework 90

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

One is explaining the world as it used to work: the importance of gatekeepers, the scarcity implied by limited distribution, and the resulting quality bar that the industry is so proud of. Mostly it is the time and expense required to create the means of distribution for that industry. It’s just taking some longer than others.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

One of the sayings I hear from talented managers in product development is, “good enough never is.&# And, most importantly, it helps team members develop the courage to stand up for these values in stressful situations. We already know who to distribute the product to (or else why would we care what they think?).

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. I also owe a great debt to Kent Beck, whose Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change was my first introduction to this kind of thinking. (So Learning is better than optimization (the local ma.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

At least, not in the traditional sense of trying to squeeze every tenth of a point out of a conversion metric or landing page. In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. For example, I’m a big believer in split-testing.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? for Harvard Business Revie.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

Its inspired by the classic OODA Loop and is really just a simplified version of that concept, applied specifically to creating a software product development team. There are three stages: We start with ideas about what our product could be. Giving rise to three verbs: Implement (programming!) for Harvard Business Revie.

San Francisco 142

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 142

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 5, 2008

MogileFS - "Distributed (meta) file system. Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Three of my favorite: memcached - an in-memory object caching system.

Open Source 107

Open Source San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 107

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 28, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, March 28, 2010 Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Thanks to the generosity of sponsors, Im pleased to be able to announce two scholarship programs for upcoming lean startup events. TechWeb has decided to expand this program to provide scholarships for the whole Web 2.0

Lean 109

Lean Programming San Francisco Continuous Deployment 109

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Focus on the output metrics of that part of the product, and you make the problem a lot more clear. I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. Whatever its purpose, try measuring it only at the level that you care about.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2010

The cost of creating new companies is falling rapidly, and access to markets, distribution, and information is within the reach of anyone with an internet connection. The result is a profound democratization of the digital means of production. The Lean Startup Cohort program. The Lean Startup Cohort program.

San Francisco 122

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 122

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Our tests suite takes nine minutes to run (distributed across 30-40 machines). This development philosophy created a culture around rapid prototyping of features, followed by testing them against large numbers of actual customers. It would be hard to argue against this product development strategy, in general.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

It is becoming easier and cheaper for companies to bring products to market, leveraging free and open source software , cloud computing, open social data (Facebook, OpenSocial ), and open distribution (AdWords, SEO). Agile software development. My path to lean startups began with Kent Beck and extreme programming.

Lean 102

Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? for Harvard Business Revie.

Software Review 68

Software Review San Francisco Technical Review Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Every board meeting, the metrics of success change. Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. And what of the product development team? First of all, they are not selling their product by hand. Go on an agile diet quickly.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

ConversionXL

MAY 27, 2022

Stage 1: Target the right metrics for an effective long game. In today’s market ( 8,000 martech products alone ), it’s easier to attract the right customer with material they value than it is to chase down and convert a prospect who isn’t ready to buy. Metrics for your demand generation funnel. Demand generation is no exception.

Demand 124

Demand B2B Distribution Channel 124

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? for Harvard Business Revie.

Audience 119

Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 5, 2019

I recently created robust user personas for CXL Institute (on inspiration from a course in our CRO certification program taught by Stefania Mereu and Eric Taylor ), and it went well. Development teams couldn’t use marketing personas to make design decisions, so they decided personas weren’t that useful. (It Career background?

Software Review 115

Software Review Design Agile Analytics 115

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? for Harvard Business Revie.

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

The cost of creating new companies is falling rapidly, and access to markets, distribution, and information is within the reach of anyone with an Internet connection. The result is a profound democratization of the digital means of production. [.] The result is a profound democratization of the digital means of production. [.]

San Francisco 121

San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

Own the development methodology - in a traditional product development setup, the VP Engineering or some other full-time manager would be responsible for making sure the engineers wrote adequate specs, interfaced well with QA, and also run the scheduling "trains" for releases. Labels: product development 15comments: mukund said.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

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.

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 12, 2009 Why PHP won When I first learned to program on the web, Perl + CGI was the dominant platform. Since then, PHP (as part of the LAMP stack ) has really been the dominant development platform, at least in the free software and startup worlds. Thats simply impossible on most platforms.

PHP 166

PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

Even the most radical Bell Curve -style thinkers have to concede that even if there are differences between men and women in the distribution of these traits on average, these curve have substantial overlap, and there should still be a lot more of them represented in high-tech startups.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

They were interested in the tools and new distribution medium kaChing provided. They were interested in the tools and new distribution medium kaChing provided. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? for Harvard Business Revie.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? for Harvard Business Revie.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Customer Lean Continuous Deployment 131

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2010

In management jobs related to operations – that is, the people tasked with actually making and distributing physical products – this kind of thinking is now considered ludicrous, thanks to a century of progress. In fact, making mistakes is seen as “proof&# of being second-class. for Harvard Business Revie.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Management Founder Lean 161

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 6, 2008

Ive been even more impressed by the various Greasemonkey compilers out there, that let you turn a Greasemonkey script into a full-blown Firefox extension, for easy distribution. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Learning is better than optimization (the local ma.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 1, 2008

Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? for Harvard Business Revie.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Developer Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

As a shoestring entrepreneur with a SaaS (well, not really, but sort of) offering that we present to very large companies (think 10K+), I love your common sense suggestions about metrics and testing. My background isnt metrics, but we came to it as a matter of practicality. 4) More posts about metrics, scaling, and online games.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 133

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Turns out, what customers really meant was "let me use IMVU with somebody I dont know" so they could get a feel for the social features of the product without incurring the social risk of recommending it to their friend. Luckily, the metrics helped us figure out the difference. Lets run a thought experiment. for Harvard Business Revie.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 17, 2009

Hello Eric, Great talk at the fb developer garage. Im passionate about music (topspin like companies)and movie (jaman like companies)distribution. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev.

Lean 76

Lean San Francisco Web Continuous Deployment 76