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The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development

Startup Lessons Learned

I believe it is the best introduction to Customer Development you can buy. As all of you know, Steve Blank is the progenitor of Customer Development and author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany. You can imagine how well that worked. You can imagine how well that worked. I think theyve succeeded.

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Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way.

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Lessons Learned: Combining agile development with customer development

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customer development Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. In most agile development systems, there is a notion of the "product backlog" a prioritized list of what software is most valuable to be developed next.

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Lessons Learned: Employees should be masters of their own time

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 3, 2009 Employees should be masters of their own time Every startup should have a culture of learning. The rule is simple: every employee is 100% responsible for how they spend their time. The suggestion is that you implement one single company-wide rule. I asked why.

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Fear is the mind-killer

Startup Lessons Learned

I spent some time with his company before the conference and discussed ways to get started with continuous deployment , including my experience introducing it at IMVU. Moreover, approaching the problem from the direction that I had intuitively is a recipe for never reaching a point where continuous deployment is feasible.

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Lessons Learned: Five Whys

Startup Lessons Learned

Hes a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD So far, this isnt much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. Instead, five whys kept leading to problems caused by an improperly trained new employee, and wed make a small adjustment. why did that code get written?

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Lessons Learned: Achieving a failure

Startup Lessons Learned

Insist on the incredibly high-IQ employees and hold them to incredibly high standards. It never generated positive returns for its investors, and most of its employees walked away dejected. This company had disciplined schedules, milestones, employee evaluations, and a culture of execution. Build a truly mainstream product.