View from Seed

NOVEMBER 6, 2014

Isaac Cambron is co-founder and CTO of Zensight.co , whose pre-launch product enables sales reps to find and use their best content to close more deals. Below, he answers questions about developing products from scratch, as well as the difficult technology choices and tradeoffs CTOs must make.

Technology 334

Technology Ruby Startup Engineer 334

BeyondVC

APRIL 4, 2018

We are at the beginning stages of one of the biggest IT shifts in history as legacy workloads in the enterprise continue to move to a cloud-native architecture. Every large enterprise is a software company which means developer productivity is paramount. New architectures = new attack vectors and security needs to be reimagined.

Cloud 60

Cloud Agile Architecture Azure 60

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 25, 2012

For the business leaders I know, these priorities almost always include the following: Business agility. Implicit in agility is increased productivity on change initiatives. Too many applications out there today are “silos,” built outside the existing organization without an overall architecture, or even a maintenance plan.

Technology 206

Technology Agile Architecture Distribution 206

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 28, 2011

For the business leaders I know, these priorities almost always include the following: Business agility. Implicit in agility is increased productivity on change initiatives. Too many applications out there today are “silos,” built outside the existing organization without an overall architecture, or even a maintenance plan.

Agile 230

Agile Startup Architecture Distribution 230

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 20, 2010

Whenever I meet a team that had a consulting firm (even a great one) build their product it’s an immediate “pass&# from me. Your deepest thinkers on technology architecture are seldom good team leaders. As the CEO you can personally help manage deadlines and the Agile process. Every great tech startup needs one.

Fractional CTO 400

Fractional CTO CTO Hire Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 400

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2011

The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. Ironically it becomes the antithesis of agile. Re-architect and re-write” the product. He told the board that the only way to to deliver these changes is to re-write our product.&#

Part-Time VPE 322

Part-Time VPE Agile Engineer Startup 322

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Creators of new products in environments of extreme uncertainty, startups face enormous risks. Through rapid experimentation, short product development cycles, and rigorous measurements of the right metrics, they can ascertain what customers really want. In the US, about 50% of small businesses fail in the first five years.

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 7, 2016

Continuous improvement applies to the business model as well as the product. In operationally excellent businesses, productivity and results are measured at every step in the value chain, not just at the end. A great business must be agile. Set business goals and milestones, and use metrics to track performance.

Technical Review 120

Technical Review Architecture Agile Business Model 120

Gust

SEPTEMBER 16, 2012

For the business leaders I know, these priorities almost always include the following: Business agility. Implicit in agility is increased productivity on change initiatives. Too many applications out there today are “silos,” built outside the existing organization without an overall architecture, or even a maintenance plan.

Technology 162

Technology Agile Architecture Distribution 162

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? That means knowing whats written and whats not, what the architecture can and cant support, and how long it would take to build something new. Labels: product development 15comments: mukund said.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Transformify

SEPTEMBER 12, 2017

Those countries relying on agriculture or oil production tend to have high unemployment rates and wide skills gaps. The ‘’must have ingredients’’ of a strong start-up team are tech, product/project management, marketing, sales, and business/finance competences. Project/ Product Management.

Africa 75

Africa Benin Seychelles Nigeria 75

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

I hope to show why lean and agile techniques actually reduce the negative impacts of technical debt and increase our ability to take advantage of its positive effects. Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. You can also download our presentation, " Just-In-Time Scalability: Agile Methods to Support Massive Growth." Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 31, 2018

In many respects, it’s the leanness, flexibility and agility of startups that help them become successful,” he says. On the other hand, startups are often the first adopters of the latest technologies, especially around operational and productivity tools, digital marketing and customer relationship management.

United Kingdom 113

United Kingdom Technical Review Design Operations 113

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2023

This meant the class was team-based, Lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering) and experiential – where the students, rather than being presented with all of the essential information, must discover that information rapidly for themselves. Class Flow Week 1 What is a simple idea?

Lean 295

Lean Chile Ukraine Spain 295

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Product development leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in product development. We didnt think wed able to compete with that.

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

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. He has a good team, and theyve shipped a working product to many customers.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

The interesting part is when you get a couple months into your product cycle. However, there’s the other side of the coin, which is the product design. After you’ve added a ton of new features and stuck them all on the homepage, you create Product Design debt.

Technical Review 47

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

Hearpreneur

FEBRUARY 18, 2024

Thanks to David Reyes, Reyes Financial Architecture ! #6- Instead, I relied on agility and adaptability. At the time, this was to improve my productivity through time-blocking and assigning unique tasks to different parts of the day. 13- Staying nimble and pivoting when necessary Photo Credit: Michael E.

Entrepreneur 116

Entrepreneur Jordan Networking AJAX 116

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

In addition to presenting the IMVU case, we tried for the first time to do an overview of a software engineering methodology that integrates practices from agile software development with Steves method of Customer Development. Unfortunately, positioning our product as an "IM add-on" was a complete mistake.

Customer Development 131

Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

Second, the leaders of these companies tended to be those who excelled at finance, supply chain or production. ARM, a competitor, not only had a better, much lower power processor, but a better business model – they licensed their architecture to other companies that designed their own products.

Architecture 227

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 14, 2013

The site visits include stops at Square (the payments startup founded by Twitter co-creator Jack Dorsey), WeWork Soma (an amazing co-working space) and Pivotal Labs (leaders in Lean and Agile consulting), along with one more super-interesting location we’ll announce shortly. Thus we reduce the risk of deployments.

Continuous Deployment 162

Continuous Deployment Norway Lean Analytics 162

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.

Technology 142

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 142

Lightspeed Venture Partners

DECEMBER 10, 2014

We had seen Lightspeed portfolio company Nicira disrupt networking layers 2-3 with an architecture that consisted of highly distributed scale out software elements coupled with centralized control, culminating in an acquisition by VMWare for $1.25B in the summer of 2012.

Architecture 121

Architecture Stealth Agile Distribution 121

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

The art team would often be involved in the specification phase of a new feature, since they were responsible for the look-and-feel of the product. When the art team would review the final product, they were inevitably outraged – it deviated from the spec in ways they considered major.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

www.bothsidesofthetable.com

MAY 13, 2012

Whenever I meet a team that had a consulting firm (even a great one) build their product it’s an immediate “pass” from me. Your deepest thinkers on technology architecture are seldom good team leaders. As the CEO you can personally help manage deadlines and the Agile process. Most often they are not.

Fractional VPE 89

Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE Fractional CTO CTO Hire 89

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 10, 2016

To achieve this mission, we established a framework that leveraged Marine Corps tenacity, agility, and adaptability to create a persistent culture of innovation. If vision without execution is hallucination, frameworks that don’t produce tangible products breed insanity. Always Be Shipping. To think differently…be different.

Framework 325

Framework Lean Metrics Government 325

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 10, 2016

To achieve this mission, we established a framework that leveraged Marine Corps tenacity, agility, and adaptability to create a persistent culture of innovation. If vision without execution is hallucination, frameworks that don’t produce tangible products breed insanity. Always Be Shipping. To think differently…be different.

Framework 325

Framework Lean Metrics Government 325

YoungUpstarts

MAY 29, 2017

Agile Methodology.”. The trend today is for teams and projects to be flexible, adaptable, continuously reassessed and developed to ensure that products and/or companies fit market demand. In the chase to produce the best minimum viable product or to push out the next killer feature, security is often given the backseat.

Security 206

Security Software Review Technical Review Agile 206

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

One of the topics that raised heated debate was whether I had conflated technical design with product design , because I made the admittedly counter-intuitive claim that sometimes good technical design actually leads to increased technical debt. The argument itself got me thinking a lot about design and its role in building products.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

He turned his PhD thesis into a killer product, got it funded and now was CEO of a company of 30. We’re building the wrong product!” And the rule was we weren’t changing anything about the product architecture until Ben and I agreed. It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development.

Founder 320

Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 320

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 27, 2010

I see it happen almost every day with startups trying to sell investors and business leaders, mostly of another generation, on the value of a new product or service. For the business leaders I know, these priorities almost always include the following: Business agility. Data security. Integration.

Entrepreneur 220

Entrepreneur Agile Architecture Distribution 220

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 18, 2011

Guest author Chris Heilmann has been a professional Web developer since 1997 and has worked in various agencies and corporations on large, international products. communicating and working together in a sensible way means you can build your products 24/7. Companies keep buying startups with cool products, good ideas and talent.

Europe 139

Europe India Hiring Engineer 139

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 21, 2020

In commercial tech you call that an integrated product team, It’s acquisition with software engineering with UI/UX. It was whatever you can do to get away from the classic DOD stovepipe way of doing business to a much more agile software approach. Minimal Viable Products. Lean, MVPs and the DOD. So that’s the goal.

Artificial Inteligence 277

Artificial Inteligence Technology Agile Architecture 277

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Most customers of most products hate new releases. Thats a perfectly reasonable reaction, given that most releases of most products are bad news. Even worse, the sad state of product development generally means that the new "features" are as likely to be ones that make the product worse, not better.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

You dont need to invent a new architecture, and you dont need to even build your architecture up-front. You can turn your entire application infrastructure investment into a pay-as-you-go variable cost, and bring new products to market at speeds an order of magnitude faster than just 10 years ago. yeah, its awesome.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of Product Development Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen is the book for you.

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153