Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review Way back when the money was doled out, the team made a compelling pitch about the large market that was going to adopt their new innovative product or service. Safely because it is clear that the manager in question didnt do his homework.

Hockey Stick 105

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

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

APRIL 14, 2009

This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. In fact, this company hasn’t shipped any new products in months.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2009

This workshop brings together leading thinkers from Lean Production and Lean software. It will probably be the first time Ill be able to take extensive Q&A on some of the new frameworks Ill be debuting at Web 2.0 The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Agile 60

Agile Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

Having had a number of years to try and answer this question at cocktail parties and social gatherings of all kinds, I thought Id try and expand on his framework a little, and then try and use these answers to help make suggestions for those who are trying to get people to buy virtual goods.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 102

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. As Steve writes in the Four Steps to the Epiphany , we always seek to find a market for the product as currently specified , not conduct a focus group to tell us what the spec should be.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 16, 2013

Palantir is a deep technical play and we had a lot of code to write just to fill out the product vision that we had already validated with potential customers; it took us two straight years of development to go from early prototypes to software that could be used in production. So what was going on?

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Lean Startup Software Engineering Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2009

Heres the working definition Ive started using: A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Q: Does the Lean Startup framework work efficiently within a company of 2-3 people (think small)?" In a future post, Ill attempt to unpack this definition in detail.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 6, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 6, 2008 When NOT to listen to your users; when NOT to rely on split-tests There are three legs to the lean startup concept: agile product development , low-cost (fast to market) platforms , and rapid-iteration customer development.

San Francisco 128

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 128

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I’ve lived through the over-architecture failure – where attempting to prevent all kinds of problems wound up delaying the company from putting out any product at all. One way to evaluate this fear is to spend time on analysis: how many customers will be affected? How upset will those customers be?

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

When I try to unpack what people mean by the question, heres my best take on what they are asking: "Look, Steve Jobs doesnt go out and ask customers what they want. He doesnt put out crappy, buggy products and then ask for feedback. He tells customers what they want, and he gets it right. We stopped production for five months.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Announce a new product, start its PR campaign, and engage in buzz marketing activities. Marketing launch) Make a new product available to customers in the general public. Product launch) In todays world, there is no reason you have to do these two things at the same time. Do some Customer Development instead.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

I usually recommend a three-part board, where the left column is where the scrum-style "product backlog" is maintained in priority order, the middle represents tasks in progress, and the right column is for tasks recently finished. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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San Francisco SCRUM Lean Continuous Deployment 68

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. The "just fix it" mentality is counter-productive here. At the end of the day, the product development team of a startup (large or small) is a service organization.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, December 16, 2008 Engagement loops: beyond viral Theres a great and growing corpus of writing about viral loops, the step-by-step optimizations you can use to encourage maximum growth of online products by having customers invite each other to join. Synthetic notifications. Who is using it?

Viral 140

Viral San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

When we started IMVU in 2004, we could rely on a staggering amount of open source software that jumpstarted our initial product offering. Add onto that the incredible amounts of infrastructure code that we reused, and we were able to bring our product to market months earlier. and Rails as a web framework. I certainly dont.

PHP 166

PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

(a guide for hackers) (This post was inspired by a conversation with Nivi from Venture Hacks , but is otherwise not his fault) There has been a proliferation of frameworks and metaphors lately that are designed to help startups avoid the all-too-common fatal mistake of failing to find a market. Is a market a set of paying customers?

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Each experiment is like a little mystery, and if you can get into a mindset of open-mindedness about the answer, the answers will continually surprise and amaze you. A few days ago I open-sourced a framework for split-testing, A/B testing or continous optimization. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 132

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 132