Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Do they have better sales, marketing, or product development groups? What the winners start with is the realization that in a world of continuous disruption, they have only a few years to develop new capabilities or be pushed over the brink. Is it that some CEOs are better than others? Are their people smarter?

Incubator 414

Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 414

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

With fewer than 10 employees but almost $2-billion dollars in the bank, they plan on jumping right in. And if their initial guesses were wrong, they needed a process that would permit them to change early on in the product development process when the cost of changes was small – the famed “pivot”. And it may work. The result?

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. So what’s wrong the product development model?

Customer Development 243

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 243

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 5, 2019

Customer personas are often talked about in marketing and product design, but they’re almost never done well. Cooper framed personas as a way of avoiding designing for an “elastic” user, and thus cementing some sort of common properties across segments to aid cohesive design strategy.

Software Review 115

Software Review Design Agile Analytics 115

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, March 25, 2009 The Lean Startup at Agile Vancouver April 21st A surprising number of respondents in the latest Lessons Learned survey hail from one of the flourishing startup hubs in Canada. Combining agile development with customer developm. And when did there get to be 3000 of you?

Agile 60

Agile Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment 60

Transformify

JANUARY 2, 2021

GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics calculates that this saving for each half-time remote employee could reach $11,000 per year. It demands a level of employee management and project management skills beyond regular. Collaboration features, designing tools, and customizable templates in these tools allow you to do project planning right.

SCRUM 98

SCRUM Management Development Team Review Agile 98

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 16, 2013

One good example is the way in which we''ve adjusted the length of different phases of our agile sprints. We don''t follow a set agile methodology, but rather follow a more home-grown, minimal version of various approaches. We''ve had to design and implement training programs to help on-board people to our culture and technology.

Lean 167

Lean Startup Software Engineering Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 3, 2009

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

Employee San Francisco Lean Software Review 146

Hearpreneur

SEPTEMBER 22, 2021

Teams under Tesla wanted to make an “electric car” without compromises, which is why the Tesla Roadster is designed to beat a gasoline sports car like a Porsche or Ferrari in a head-to-head showdown. Tesla has always put a huge emphasis on product development and technological advancement. Photo Credit: Curtis Lawson.

Technical Review 122

Technical Review Entrepreneur Software Review SEO 122

Hearpreneur

JANUARY 26, 2022

To overcome these challenges, leaders will need to keep people at the center of our conversations, and organizations will need to help their employees build emotional intelligence and expert people skills. Thanks to Oliver Andrews, OA Design Services ! #19- Think of the agility that comes with CAI, etc.

Software Review 122

Software Review Technical Review Artificial Inteligence Entrepreneur 122

ConversionXL

MARCH 7, 2017

User personas are often talked about in marketing and product design, but they’re almost never done well. Cooper framed personas as a way of avoiding designing for an “elastic” user, and thus cementing some sort of common properties across segments to aid cohesive design strategy.

Software Review 102

Software Review Design Agile Analytics 102

YoungUpstarts

MARCH 4, 2015

In order to grow, startups need a much more focused, realistic and agile approach to goal setting that builds momentum and establishes a pattern of success. Norton found that a shocking 93 percent of employees don’t fully understand their company’s business strategies and what’s expected of them as individuals to achieve those goals.

Agile 100

Agile Startup Cofounder Metrics 100

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 14, 2014

As companies strive to stay agile and innovative, they’ve discovered that units of 8 to 12 people work best as the natural size of high-performance teams. This is the magic number for leadership teams, product teams, research teams, design teams, and more. People in small teams trust each other.

Agile 196

Agile Leadership Architecture Product Development 196

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Insist on the incredibly high-IQ employees and hold them to incredibly high standards. Build a truly mainstream product. Insist on high levels of usability, UI design, and polish. It never generated positive returns for its investors, and most of its employees walked away dejected. Focus on quality. Mission accomplished.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

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. This is precisely the dilemma that the doctrine of minimum viable product is designed to solve.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

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. Even worse, agile wasnt really helping me ship higher quality software.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

These groups are adapting or adopting the practices of startups and accelerators – disruption and innovation rather than direct competition, customer development versus more product features, agility and speed versus lowest cost. The question is – why? StageGate Process.

IRR 335

IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

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. Joel said it: "Top notch development teams dont torture their programmers."

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

mashable.com

JUNE 11, 2013

Dont underestimate the importance of Minimum Viable Design. Your first product will likely be just a little bit ugly, and thats okay — its part of getting to market quickly and testing your idea in front of live customers. At a small company, employees need to wear many hats, and they need to be prepared to wear many hats.

Cofounder 111

Cofounder Technical Review Startup Software Review 111

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

On the one hand, it gives you insight into what kind of employee the candidate might be. The technical interview is at the heart of these challenges when building a product development team, and so I thought it deserved an entire post on its own. The six key attributes spell ABCDEF: Agility.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

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. Thats an important job, for sure, and Ive been called upon to do it from time to time.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

ConversionXL

APRIL 3, 2018

Corporate Agility. Transparency correlates to agility (Does your CEO know how many tests you ran last month?). Understand: funnel analyis to identify opportunities – 75K people / day werent able to login because of a bad login screen design. Be agile, move at the speed of business, don’t hold up product development.

Retention 106

Retention Artificial Inteligence Channel Email 106

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 19, 2010

No wait, I forgot, actually the question is: What happens when employee #2 makes off with your code and roadmap and marketing data and customer list, moves to Bolivia, and starts selling your stuff world-wide at one-tenth the price? But now she has the vision and ability to design her own software, capitalizing on modern trends (e.g.

Software Review 325

Software Review Technical Review Development Team Review Bolivia 325

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

This theory has become so influential that I have called it one of the three pillars of the lean startup - every bit as important as the changes in technology or the advent of agile development. You can learn about customer development, and quite a bit more, in Steves book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Heres the catch.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 6, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 6, 2008 When NOT to listen to your users; when NOT to rely on split-tests There are three legs to the lean startup concept: agile product development , low-cost (fast to market) platforms , and rapid-iteration customer development. Thats what business is designed to do.

San Francisco 128

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 128

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 10, 2018

For manufacturers, this means having the capability to establish fully connected and digitized supply chains where product development, marketing, production, and distribution are all fully connected, thus increasing efficiency and output. Start planning on how to adapt to Industry 4.0 Be Updated. Start Small But Keep On Moving.

Agile 100

Agile Analytics Cloud Bankruptcy 100

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Apple has a track record of creating lots of interesting enabling infrastructure, like Quicktime and Bonjour, which sometimes become key to their products and othertimes not. My guess is they have lots of people constantly working on interesting new tools for their designers to play with. Will start to pay attention. Great post Eric.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

bhargreaves.com

MARCH 7, 2010

The reasons why I am not a big fan of development shops are too numerous to go into here. In brief, startups succeed because there is strong alignment of interests among all parties, especially with the people who are actually building the product. Actually any shop that does agile development with daily and weekly releases should.

Hiring 40

Hiring Technical Review Agile Software Review 40

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 17, 2009

Eric- I am an industrial design student at Virginia Tech. Although Im not a developer, I am captivated by the lean and agile start-up model that you write about. I plan to apply these models to my own ventures, especially within new contexts separate from software and web development. . Tried it with multiple browsers.

Lean 76

Lean San Francisco Web Continuous Deployment 76

Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

Its goal is to take the original idea and search for a repeatable and scalable business model - first by finding product/market fit, then by testing all the parts of the business model (pricing, channel, acquisition/activation, partners, costs, etc.). If any of the answers are “Yes,” then hire them a bit later as an early employee.

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Advisory Board Customer Development Leadership 335

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content. That institution will touch many people in its life: customers, investors, employees, and everyone they touch as well.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 5, 2010

I used to give copies of Four Steps out to my employees, in the hopes that it would instantly indoctrinate them into the methodology of Customer Development. While maintaining persistence and willpower is certainly good advice, Customer Development methodologies are designed to give you data and feedback you may not want to hear.

Customer Development 166

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 166

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

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. I pick that example on purpose, for two reasons: 1) most of the companies I work with deal with this problem and yet 2) almost none of them have any kind of training program in place for new employees.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Github - Free public repositories, collaborator management, issue tracking, wikis, downloads, code review, graphs Pivotal Tracker – Agile project management tool that enables real time collaboration. WebSequenceDiagrams - sketch sequence diagrams. Lighthouse – Issue Tracking Tool.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

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. Instead, five whys kept leading to problems caused by an improperly trained new employee, and wed make a small adjustment. why did that code get written?

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

Customer Development : a disciplined approach to finding out if there is a market for your product before its too late. Customer Development Engineering : techniques for accelerating your product development. Combining agile development with customer developm. Work in small batches. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117