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Lessons Learned: Combining agile development with customer development

Startup Lessons Learned

XP and Scrum don’t have much to say - they punt. Its by far the hardest part of the puzzle of shipping successful products and both recommend that you get a customer in the room and ask them to clarify what they want as you go. Labels: customer development , product development 8comments: Sarah Milstein said.

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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

Lean 168
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Lessons Learned: A new version of the Joel Test (draft)

Startup Lessons Learned

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. He wrote it in 2000, and as far as I know has never updated it.

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The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part three

Startup Lessons Learned

When youve mastered that, consider adding operations, customer service, marketing, product management, business development - the idea is that when the team needs to get approval or support from another department, they already have an "insider" who can make it happen. At IMVU, we found 60 days was just about right.

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Lessons Learned: The product manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

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.

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You don't need as many tools as you think

Startup Lessons Learned

Heres something I can relate to: We used assembla for subversion, scrums, milestones, wikis, and for general organizational purposes. We had all the tools in place but we didn’t actually practice agile development. Scrum reports would come in once a month, nobody was actually responsible for anything.

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Lessons Learned: Built to learn

Startup Lessons Learned

I have been using various forms of Agile development -- mainly XP and Scrum -- for many years, but only recently came across "customer development" which makes a whole lot of sense to me. Product development leverage Validated learning about customers Built to learn Web 2.0 Excellent post.