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Lessons Learned: Combining agile development with customer development

Startup Lessons Learned

Ever since that time, I have struggled to explain how the feedback loop in customer development should interface with the feedback loop in product development. Eric Ries Lean Startup Schematic View Of Agile Development And Customer Development View more presentations from Eric Ries. Just a thought.

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

Startup Lessons Learned

Focus on the output metrics of that part of the product, and you make the problem a lot more clear. I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. Whatever its purpose, try measuring it only at the level that you care about.

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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. The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants. Leverage product development with open source and third parties.

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

Startup Lessons Learned

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. Still, a startup product development team is a service organization. As they optimize their solution, they eventually wind up deriving Bresenhams circle algorithm.

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Learning is better than optimization (the local maximum problem)

Startup Lessons Learned

At least, not in the traditional sense of trying to squeeze every tenth of a point out of a conversion metric or landing page. In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. For example, I’m a big believer in split-testing.

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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. You can even read a cool paper one of our engineers wrote on this approach).

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Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups

Startup Lessons Learned

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. Theres no complex algorithm to go wrong, just a simple lookup table. Of course, you could use URL-based sharding to "wrap" a CH algorithm (or any hashing scheme you wanted).