Cofounder, Demand, Product Development and Washington

Lessons Learned: Product development leverage

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Product development leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in product development. Its a key lean startup concept.

Product Development

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product

Lessons Learned: Using AdWords to assess demand for your new.

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, November 7, 2008 Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online service, step-by-step If you want to build an online service, and you dont test it with a fake AdWords campaign ahead of time, youre crazy. Turns out, there was aboslutely no demand whatsoever for that particular product.

Demand

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment

Lessons Learned: About the author

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. October 13, 2008 6:47 PM Luke G said. Eric, love the blog.

San Francisco

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO

Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

What those sites have in common (despite their very different audiences) is that something is causing their customers to become addicted to their product, and so no matter how they acquire a new customer, they tend to keep them. For Neopets, its simply a side-effect of their game-like product design. This has led to exponential growth.

San Francisco

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire

Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Customer development is a parallel process to product development, which means that you dont have to give up on your dream. Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers. Instead, we do everything possible to validate the founders belief.

Customer Development

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer

Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So what does CTO mean, besides just "technical founder who really cant manage anyone?" By delegating and training, we create a corps of leaders who could step in to provide CTO-like services on demand. Labels: product development 15comments: mukund said. I always assumed I wouldnt manage anybody.

CTO

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review

A real Customer Advisory Board

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 26, 2009

Anyone who has worked in a real-world product development team can tell you how utopian that sounds. They had their own private forum, and a company founder (aka me) personally ran the group in its early days. Customers kept demanding that we add this or that IM feature, and we were routinely refusing.

Advisory Board

Advisory Board Customer San Francisco Lean

Lessons Learned: Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development?

Agile

Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment

Lessons Learned: Principles of Lean Startups, presentation for.

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Eric, Any thoughts on how forum feedback fits into customer development and agile product development? Youve probably addressed this in the past, but I continue to be blown away by how fast Blizzard reacts to noise in their forums and rapidly makes fixes to the product. What is customer development?

Lean

Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment

Lessons Learned: The four kinds of work, and how to get them done.

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. If youre making revenue, you should be finding ways to grow it predictably month-over-month; if youre focused on customer engagement, your product should be getting more sticky, and so on.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC

Lessons Learned: ScienceDaily: Corporate culture is most important.

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

I believe its important that product teams be cross-functional, no matter what other job function the product champion does. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

San Francisco

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC

Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

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.

Technical Review

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean

Datablindness

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

Periodic or on-demand reports are one possibility, but we can do much better. I got a powerful taste of datablindness recently, as I’ve started to work with various large companies as partners in setting up events, speeches, and other products to sell around the Lean Startup concept. We can learn to see.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC

Marching through quicksand

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

The other revels in the world as we all know it will be someday: limitless distribution enabled by new technologies, the importance of collaborative filters, and on-demand availability of all content for end-users. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. Is that a lot?

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution

Why Continuous Deployment?

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

As a consumer internet company with millions of customers, it may seem to have little relevancy for an enterprise software company with only a handful of potential customers, or a computer security company whose customers demand a rigorous audit before accepting a new release. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

Continuous Deployment

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean

For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? (for Harvard Business.

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 11, 2010

High-profile startup Friendster had first-mover advantage in the social networking space, but created openings for competitors when it could not scale to meet demand. High-profile startup Friendster had first-mover advantage in the social networking space, but created openings for competitors when it could not scale to meet demand.

San Francisco

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC

Stop lying on stage

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2010

Many journalists and conference organizers attempt to fill this demand by giving successful entrepreneurs the opportunity to tell their stories: in magazines, on blogs, and on stage. It makes successful founders famous. It makes successful founders famous. It sells newspapers and magazines. It helps companies with PR.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Metrics PR

Minimum Viable Product: a guide

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Refreshing to finally see lean and agile thinking emerge in product/business-floors and not only in technology. Critical also, as the lean company/start-up can not be lean by just using lean principles in IT and not in Product Development/Management - a common misinterpretation of the Toyota Production System.

San Francisco

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment

Getting educated about advertising, agencies, and media buyers

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development?

Advertising

Advertising San Francisco Media Continuous Deployment

Good enough never is (or is it?)

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

One of the sayings I hear from talented managers in product development is, “good enough never is.&# And, most importantly, it helps team members develop the courage to stand up for these values in stressful situations. I believe this is one reason why the myth of the dictatorial startup founder has such enduring appeal.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review

Lessons Learned: Where did Silicon Valley come from?

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

In contrast, Stanfords leaders, lacking corporate or government ties or even easy proximity to Washington, actively promoted the formation of new technology enterprises and forums for cooperation with local industry. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development?

Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment

Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

Im Community Manager at VenCorps, co-host of commandN. I worked at Flock, ConceptShare and co-founded Raincity Studios in Vancouver. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC

Lessons Learned: Continuous deployment and continuous learning

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

It’s important to note that system I’m about to explain evolved organically in response to new demands on the system and in response to post-mortems of failures. Nobody gets here overnight, but every step along the way has made us better developers. If a feature worked, wed keep it. If it didnt, wed trash it. But it worked.

Continuous Deployment

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean

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

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. Still, a startup product development team is a service organization. Labels: hiring , product development 5comments: TedHoward said.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Agile Java

How to conduct a Five Whys root cause analysis

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 15comments: Anonymoussaid. oh, and on the book front, you'll be able to get all of my essays so far in ebook, print-on-demand, and kindle editions - coming soon. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review

Lessons Learned: The four kinds of work, and how to get them done.

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development?

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC

Business ecology and the four customer currencies

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

In other words, the minimum viable product is designed to answer the question: does the product generate enough demand and margin to support a growing ecosystem? Minimum viable product is a tactic for mitigating risk. Founders struggle with this question. Minimum viable product is a tactic for mitigating risk.

Customer

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean

The curse of prevention

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

It could be fixed by refactoring the code itself, or by partitioning the data horizontally or vertically, or by adding additional capacity at the point of the bottleneck, or by shaping end-user demand, or even by removing the feature itself. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment

Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

As the company grows, hes the go-to person for almost everything technical, and so hes very much in demand. Sometimes, a great hacker has the potential to grow into the CTO of a company, and in those cases all you need is an outside mentor who can work with them to develop those skills. He throws off volumes of code, and it works.

Software Review

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco

Lessons Learned: Five Whys

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development?

Software Review

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment

Why Free Plans Don't Work

Software By Rob

AUGUST 18, 2010

Before: After: And thenI ran into a Mixergy interview where 37signals founder, Jason Fried, talks about their free plan (6:00 into the interview): “… The majority of the revenues for our products come from people who sign up for the paid versions upfront. I saw that 37signals had hidden theirs. But is it the right data?

Software Review

Software Review Software Revenue Cofounder

Lessons Learned: Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to.

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development?

.Net

.Net Operations San Francisco Lean

Towards a new entrepreneurship

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2010

This is just like a startup to me, complete with distribution and product development challenges, ecosystem design and many, many customers. Steve Blank has asked me to co-teach his MBA entrepreneurship class at Berkeley Haas, starting January 19, and to revamp the curriculum to make it a full introduction to the lean startup.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC

Lessons Learned: What is a market? (a guide for hackers)

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

To wit: achieving product/market fit , getting customer validation , making something people want , things that matter , and of course the many excellent books on the topic, of which Ill mention just two of the best, Crossing the Chasm and The Innovators Dilemma. Founders are constantly being barraged by incoherent and contradictory advice.

San Francisco

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean

Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campaign trail

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

Wed train them on-demand as they came in, and send them into the world (or onto the phones) with written instructions and voter contact data. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

Campaign

Campaign San Francisco Lean Agile

The cardinal sin of community management

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

until I couldn't seem to find a way from getting away from all these nasty, vulgar teens (or people pretending to be teens) demanding explicit sex every time I went there. As a founder of a company, there is nothing more painful than to see your most loyal and devoted customers suffering. So I gave up. We are partners.

Community

Community Management Lean Software Review

StartUpRoar

Lessons Learned: Product development leverage

Lessons Learned: Using AdWords to assess demand for your new.

Trending Sources

Lessons Learned: About the author

Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

A real Customer Advisory Board

Lessons Learned: Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile

Lessons Learned: Principles of Lean Startups, presentation for.

Lessons Learned: The four kinds of work, and how to get them done.

Lessons Learned: ScienceDaily: Corporate culture is most important.

Embrace technical debt

Datablindness

Marching through quicksand

Why Continuous Deployment?

For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? (for Harvard Business.

Stop lying on stage

Minimum Viable Product: a guide

Getting educated about advertising, agencies, and media buyers

Good enough never is (or is it?)

Lessons Learned: Where did Silicon Valley come from?

Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?

Lessons Learned: Continuous deployment and continuous learning

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

How to conduct a Five Whys root cause analysis

Lessons Learned: The four kinds of work, and how to get them done.

Business ecology and the four customer currencies

The curse of prevention

Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

Lessons Learned: Five Whys

Why Free Plans Don't Work

Lessons Learned: Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to.

Towards a new entrepreneurship

Lessons Learned: What is a market? (a guide for hackers)

Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campaign trail

The cardinal sin of community management

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