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Lessons Learned: Combining agile development with customer development

Startup Lessons Learned

Jim Murphy is a long-time agile practitioner in startups. But startups sometimes have trouble applying agile successfully. Embedded in that assumption is why startups fail. Notice that the unit of progress changes as we move from waterfall to agile to the lean startup. Hes often felt that there was something missing.

Agile 111
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Lessons Learned: The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the time

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 15, 2008 The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the time Split-testing is a core lean startup discipline, and its one of those rare topics that comes up just as often in a technical context as in a business-oriented one when Im talking to startups. First of all, why split-test?

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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. In a startup, we should take full advantage of our options, even if they feel dirty or riddled with technical debt. Startups are always moving, so invest in moving faster and better.

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Lessons Learned: The ABCDEF's of conducting a technical interview

Startup Lessons Learned

By far the most important thing you want to hire for in a startup is the ability to handle the unexpected. Those people also tend to go crazy in a startup. The "lone wolf" superstar is usually a disaster in a team context, and startups are all about teams. Still, a startup product development team is a service organization.

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Lessons Learned: Five Whys

Startup Lessons Learned

Because five whys kept turning up a few key metrics that were hard to set static thresholds for, we even had a dynamic prediction algorithm that would make forecasts based on past data, and fire alerts if the metric ever went out of its normal bounds. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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Learning is better than optimization (the local maximum problem)

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, April 7, 2010 Learning is better than optimization (the local maximum problem) Lean startups don’t optimize. At least, not in the traditional sense of trying to squeeze every tenth of a point out of a conversion metric or landing page. For example, I’m a big believer in split-testing.

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Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, January 4, 2009 Sharding for startups The most important aspect of a scalable web architecture is data partitioning. More common is to use a one-way hashing algorithm to map the data to be accessed to one of the shards that store it. But startups rarely have either luxury. to store it.