A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 19, 2010

During a lull in her practice she got a serendipitous opportunity to shift gears completely and ended up leading software product development teams. Indeed, most of the innovations we've made at Smart Bear in the art of code review have already been duplicated by both commercial and open-source competitors.

Software Review 325

Software Review Technical Review Development Team Review Bolivia 325

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. The result was a new process of four-week iterative cycles all about throttling new code.

Lean 167

Lean Startup Software Engineering Agile 167

ConversionXL

JUNE 13, 2017

Agile marketing may not be a phrase you hear often, but it’s becoming increasingly popular and important. Traditionally associated with development and product management, agile is a lightweight and, well, agile framework for software development and bringing features and products to market.

SCRUM 112

SCRUM Agile Marketing Development Team Review 112

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2010

To get to this Transition stage, the company needed passionate visionaries who can articulate a compelling vision, agile enough to learn and discover in real time, resilient enough to deal with countless failures, and responsive enough to capitalize on what they learned in order to secure early customers. What’s Next.

Agile 120

Agile Development Team Review Leadership Merger 120

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

But I have a special sympathy for the "product manager" in a startup that is bringing a new product to a new market, and doing their work in large batches. 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. Nice write-up.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

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. To probe for agility, you have to ask the candidate questions involving something that they know little about.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

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

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. Expo SF (May.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. What is customer development? Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online. Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campa.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

You constantly assess the situation, looking for hazards and timing your movements carefully to get across safely. So the product development team was busy creating lots of split-tests for lots of hypotheses. Each day, the analytics team would share a report with them that had the details of how each test was doing.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Sometimes, a great hacker has the potential to grow into the CTO of a company, and in those cases all you need is an outside mentor who can work with them to develop those skills. At the end of the day, the product development team of a startup (large or small) is a service organization. Does this sound familiar?

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94