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Lessons Learned: The product manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, October 5, 2008 The product managers lament Life is not easy when youre working in an old-fashioned waterfall development process, no matter what role you play. 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.

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Lessons Learned: Combining agile development with customer development

Startup Lessons Learned

In most agile development systems, there is a notion of the "product backlog" a prioritized list of what software is most valuable to be developed next. But, over the years I’ve realized that the toughest problem - the one that matters most and was consistently the most challenging - was figuring out what the product backlog should be.

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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. My belief is that these lean startups will achieve dramatically lower development costs, faster time to market, and higher quality products in the years to come. No more, no less.

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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. He wrote it in 2000, and as far as I know has never updated it. Do you have a spec?

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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage. The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants. Unfortunately, customers hated that initial product.

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Lessons Learned: ScienceDaily: Corporate culture is most important.

Startup Lessons Learned

I believe its important that product teams be cross-functional, no matter what other job function the product champion does. At IMVU , we called this person a Producer (revealing our games background); in Scrum , they are called the Product Owner. about what their function needs to do to fully support the product.

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7 Highlights from Lean Startup Week

Startup Lessons Learned

Editor’s Note: We wrapped up the 2017 Lean Startup Week in San Francisco just a few weeks ago, and we’re excited to share with you some of the best lessons learned in entrepreneurship and corporate innovation. And what are some of the challenges they're facing with the product right now? Not, ‘what's the technology?’

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