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Lessons Learned: The engineering manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. The current code is spaghetti, but the new code will be elegant.

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Lessons Learned: A new version of the Joel Test (draft)

Startup Lessons Learned

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. Do you fix bugs before writing code? Completely necessary.

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Lessons Learned: Five Whys

Startup Lessons Learned

A new bit of code contained an infinite loop! why did that code get written? Hes a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD So far, this isnt much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. Most engineers would ship code to production on their first day.

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The Future of Startups 2013-2017

Scalable Startup

Marc Andreessen: So the computer industry started in 1950 and basically ran for 50 years with the same model, which was a model where all of the new computers, all the new technology, all the new software started out being sold for the highest prices to the biggest organizations. So originally the customer was the Department of Defense.

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Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

When Ive asked mentors of mine who have worked in big companies about the role of the CTO, they usually talk about the importance of being the external face of the companys technology platform; an evangelist to developers, customers, and employees. If not, whos going to insist we switch to free and open source software?

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Lessons Learned: Employees should be masters of their own time

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 3, 2009 Employees should be masters of their own time Every startup should have a culture of learning. The rule is simple: every employee is 100% responsible for how they spend their time. The suggestion is that you implement one single company-wide rule. I asked why.

Employee 146
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How to conduct a Five Whys root cause analysis

Startup Lessons Learned

For example, a site outage may seem like it was caused by a bad piece of code, but: why was that code written? For example, I often cite a real example of a problem that has as its root cause a new employee who was not properly trained. If new employees are causing problems, that will be a routine topic.