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

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 238

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 22, 2008 Thoughts on scientific product development I enjoyed reading a post today from Laserlike (Mike Speiser), on Scientific product development. I agree with the less is more product development approach, but for a different reason. Now that is fun.

Product Development 68

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 68

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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Agile 60

Agile Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, February 22, 2009 Please teach kids programming, Mr. President Of course, what I really mean is: let them teach themselves. See Paul Grahams Why Nerds are Unpopular to learn more) Take a look at this article on a programming Q&A site: How old are you, and how old were you when you started coding?

Programming 143

Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 25, 2011

It may be hard to remember that there was a time when people in the agile software development community thought Lean Startup was incompatible with agile practices. But along with Intuit founder Scott Cook, Brad is a leader that recognizes that entrepreneurship is critical to his company’s success. Hope to see you there.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Silicon Valley Lean Agile 146

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, July 9, 2010 Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# theory of management At any given time, something like four percent of the US population is engaged in some form of new-company-creation. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Management Founder Lean 161

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

Compressing the Product Development Cycle. In the past, the time to build a first product release was measured in months or even years as startups executed the founder’s vision of what customers wanted. This meant building every possible feature the founding team envisioned into a monolithic “release” of the product.

Silicon Valley 335

Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital Software Review 335

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Unfortunately, positioning our product as an "IM add-on" was a complete mistake.

Customer Development 131

Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. The lean startup is an application of Lean Thinking. No more, no less.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 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. After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes. Conference streaming, sponsors, discounted tickets.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Without conscious process design, product development teams turn lines of code written into momentum in a certain direction. This is why agility is such a prized quality in product development. As far as I know, there are no products that are immune from the technology life cycle adoption curve. Great post!

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

If done right, a programming interview serves two purposes simultaneously. 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

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Boyd emphasized the importance of agility in combat: "the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than ones opponent." Agile software development. Agile allows companies to build higher quality software faster. Hopefully others will find it useful as well.

Lean 102

Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 2, 2010

And yet the key to startup speed is to maintain a disciplined approach to testing and evaluating new products, features, and ideas. As start-ups scale, this agility will be lost unless the founders maintain a consistent investment in that discipline. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

Technical Review 132

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 132

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2009

For those whove heard it, it contains a length discourse on the subject of agile software development and extreme programming, including its weaknesses when applied to startups. As Im pontificating about agile, I see the name Kent Beck in my peripheral vision. Was that really the Kent Beck?

Lean 140

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 140

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Refreshing to finally see lean and agile thinking emerge in product/business-floors and not only in technology. Critical also, as the lean company/start-up can not be lean by just using lean principles in IT and not in Product Development/Management - a common misinterpretation of the Toyota Production System.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

That leads to a seemingly-obvious question: what is progress in software development? Heck, thats what it says right there in the agile manifesto. This was an effective approach to discovering a business by using a sequence of product prototypes to get early customer feedback. If a feature worked, wed keep it. We made it.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. In fact, this company hasn’t shipped any new products in months.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

This builds on a lot of great thinking that has come before, like the agile movements insistence that only the creation of working code counts as progress for a software development team. None of it would have happened if we had plenty of cash, or were content to count our progress by traffic or product development milestones.

San Francisco 98

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 98

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

Eventually, I hope to get them on a full agile diet, with TDD, scrums, sprints, pair programming, and more. But first I think we need to save the product manager from that special form of torture only a waterfall product development team can create. Labels: product development 8comments: Vincent van Wylick said.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

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.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

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

MARCH 25, 2010

This is the first post that moves into making specific process recommendations for product development. Labels: product development Speed up or slow down? This is the first post that moves into making specific process recommendations for product development. for Harvard Business Revie. Amazon PostRank

Software Review 141

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

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. I believe this is one reason why the myth of the dictatorial startup founder has such enduring appeal.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). 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.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

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 10, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, September 10, 2008 Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now A great checklist of techniques and tools for making your development more agile, written from a Rail perspective. Amazon PostRank

Software Review 68

Software Review San Francisco Technical Review Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

Its to everyones advantage to let the world think the founders thought of everything. I say this as a founder: the contribution of founders is always overestimated. The danger here is that new founders, looking at existing founders, will think that theyre supermen that one couldnt possibly equal oneself.

San Francisco 125

San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

Its inspired by the classic OODA Loop and is really just a simplified version of that concept, applied specifically to creating a software product development team. There are three stages: We start with ideas about what our product could be. Giving rise to three verbs: Implement (programming!) Great points Eric.

San Francisco 142

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 142

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

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. Some startups fail because the founders cant have this conversation - they either blow up when they try, or they fail to change because they are afraid of conflict. And how do you pick a new direction? Both are lethal outcomes.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customer development , the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop , and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience. Creating a company-wide feedback loop that incorporates both customer development and agile development is a challenge.

San Francisco 132

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Austin Startup

MARCH 5, 2019

Boost Biomes CEO and co-founder Jamie Bacher The Forrest Four-Cast: March 5, 2019 Fifty diverse startups will aim to impress a panel of judges and a live audience with their skills, creativity and innovation at SXSW Pitch Presented by Cyndx. Jamie Bacher , CEO and co-founder, answered some questions about the San Francisco-based company.

Technical Review 48

Technical Review Harvest Startup San Francisco 48

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Luckily, I now have the benefit of a forthcoming book, The Principles of Product Development Flow. Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 11comments: Peter Severin said. Sounds very similar to agile development which is the way. Interesting post. February 21, 2009 7:39 AM Rocky1138 said.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Sometimes we have the attitude that the Product Development team is the one responsible for Activation and Retention (hey, a great product would do that naturally) or that the Marketing team is responsible for Revenue and Referral (hey, go get me some money or free customers already). for Harvard Business Revie.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So what does CTO mean, besides just "technical founder who really cant manage anyone?" If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? Labels: product development 15comments: mukund said. I always assumed I wouldnt manage anybody.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168