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Startup Advice: When to Use a Consulting CTO

rapidrollout.wordpress.com

Investors use a consulting CTO for technical due diligence. A consulting CTO can help you find and qualify a permanent technology partner, a lead developer, a user experience expert or interaction designer, a graphic designer, or a VP of engineering. third party to vet or manage&# your development team.

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The Principles of Product Development Flow

Startup Lessons Learned

But it goes beyond that, including techniques for improving the economics of product development. Reinertsen weaves together ideas from lean manufacturing, maneuver warfare, queuing theory, and even the architecture of computer operating systems and the Internet. That is what we started with on the Internet 30 years ago.

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Daddy, What Does a Chief Technology Officer Do?

dontbesoanalytical.blogspot.com

The CTO should not manage developers. The head of development spends his or her time working to keep the development team on track against a set of product plans. Inside the development organization, this Director attends to staffing, training, workload and productivity metrics, budget, and scheduling.

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Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

I know them right away - we can talk high-level architecture all the way down to the bits-and-bytes of his system. When they see a problem with the teams process, why dont they just fix it? When the architecture needs modifying - why do we need a meeting? Building a good application architecture is not just coding.

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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. and going into a long diatribe about how insecure the ActiveX architecture was compared to Javas pristine sandbox. what happens if we have a pipelined architecture?

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Lessons Learned: The engineering manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

Most of the other processs changes - mandatory design reviews (prelimninary, critical, etc), - documenting all our procedures, and so on - were to support those two factors. A project usually has an absolute duration and budget whereas the time and money dedicated to development within the project is where the tradeoffs are made.

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Lessons Learned: Product development leverage

Startup Lessons Learned

The idea of leverage is simple: for every ounce of effort your product development team puts into your product, find ways to magnify that effort by getting many other people to invest along with you. Open APIs and data-oriented architecture (aka "web 2.0"). Its a key lean startup concept.