Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown, and the key to success is building an integrated team that includes product development in the feedback loop with customers. We talk about taking advantages of the incredible agility offered by modern web architecture for extremely rapid deployment, etc.

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Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, February 16, 2009 Continuous deployment with downloads One of my goals in writing posts about topics like continuous deployment is the hope that people will take those ideas and apply them to new situations - and then share what they learn with the rest of us.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

The art team would often be involved in the specification phase of a new feature, since they were responsible for the look-and-feel of the product. When the art team would review the final product, they were inevitably outraged – it deviated from the spec in ways they considered major.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

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. He has a good team, and theyve shipped a working product to many customers.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

One of the topics that raised heated debate was whether I had conflated technical design with product design , because I made the admittedly counter-intuitive claim that sometimes good technical design actually leads to increased technical debt. The argument itself got me thinking a lot about design and its role in building products.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

You dont need to invent a new architecture, and you dont need to even build your architecture up-front. You can turn your entire application infrastructure investment into a pay-as-you-go variable cost, and bring new products to market at speeds an order of magnitude faster than just 10 years ago. yeah, its awesome.

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San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of Product Development Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen is the book for you.

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

www.subelsky.com

FEBRUARY 25, 2010

Heres a revised version of what I emailed in response, garnered while building OtherInbox and other Rails apps: First and foremost, I find Rails itself to be very useful for building a product for a lean startup; the expressiveness of Ruby and the conventions of Rails help developers more quickly build a minimum viable product.

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Lean Baltimore Ruby Maryland 41

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

It’s important to invest in good architecture so that your website will scale once customers arrive. If you make that investment, and then customers arrive, and the site stays up, most companies will reward the people who built the architecture and, thus, prevented the scaling problems. Why do they harbor that paranoia?

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

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. So dont just kill the feature - iterate.

Product Development 68

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 68

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, November 13, 2008 Five Whys Taiichi Ohno was one of the inventors of the Toyota Production System. His book Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production is a fascinating read, even though its decidedly non-practical. Each five whys email is a teaching document. and so forth.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

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. For a marketing job, for example, its reasonable to expect that a candidate will have done their homework and used your product (maybe even talked to your customers) before coming in.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

In a few cases, they are clearly smart people in a bad situation, and Ive written about their pain in The product managers lament and The engineering managers lament. I know them right away - we can talk high-level architecture all the way down to the bits-and-bytes of his system. The "just fix it" mentality is counter-productive here.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, January 4, 2009 Sharding for startups The most important aspect of a scalable web architecture is data partitioning. In this scheme, all of the data related to a specific feature of a product are stored on the same machines. Two of my favorites are from Flixster and LiveJournal. Easy to understand.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

I'll add two ideas: The modern structure of university patent licensing and technology transfer works really well in the life sciences and other fields with expensive product development processes. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. You can view it at [link] September 9, 2009 3:34 PM Hamish MacDonald said.

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Build a truly mainstream product. Build the product in stealth mode to build buzz for the eventual launch. The whole company and board play-tested the product to see its new features first hand. Everyone had fun; the product worked. Even a great architecture becomes inflexible. Focus on quality.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

They have a product that has a moderate number of customers. Still, theyre not really hitting it out of the park, because their product isnt growing new users as fast as theyd like, and they arent making any money from the current users. On the other, they already have a team fully engaged on making their product architecture better.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79