Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 4, 2010

Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development. To his credit are Extreme Programming , jUnit, patterns, TDD , the list goes on. Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development. To his credit are Extreme Programming , jUnit, patterns, TDD , the list goes on.

Agile 99

Agile Software Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 99

Feld Thoughts

MARCH 11, 2010

Most of the companies we invest in release software at least once a month. Designate one person in charge of managing the hackathon. The Hackathon manager should come up with an easy way to manage the team list (hint – wiki). This way all of the activity is captured and can be reviewed afterwards.

Software Review 138

Software Review Wiki Continuous Deployment Agile 138

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, February 20, 2009 Work in small batches Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches. Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. I dont think so.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, September 10, 2008 Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now A great checklist of techniques and tools for making your development more agile, written from a Rail perspective.

Software Review 68

Software Review San Francisco Technical Review Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So what does CTO mean, besides just "technical founder who really cant manage anyone?" I always assumed I wouldnt manage anybody. Being a manager didnt sound fun - deep down, who really wants to be held accountable for other peoples actions? And what about if deployment takes forever? I mean, have you seen other people?

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile : "Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective. They take things like unit testing, design documents and code reviews more seriously than any other company Ive even heard about. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Agile 76

Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

Your natural tendency when an investor says yes will be to relax and go back to writing code. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Alas, you cant; you have to keep looking for more investors, if only to get this one to act.

San Francisco 125

San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, February 10, 2009 Continuous deployment and continuous learning At long last, some of the actual implementers of the advanced systems we built at IMVU for rapid deployment and rapid response are starting to write about it. Our code pushes take another six minutes.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

They are leaders, visionaries, founders and managers having tremendous success. I was the junior guy on a project team; I was called in to do some technical due diligence for reasons that were obscure to me, because the team already had much more senior engineers assigned to it. I was an engineer on the engineering team.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, February 16, 2009 Continuous deployment with downloads One of my goals in writing posts about topics like continuous deployment is the hope that people will take those ideas and apply them to new situations - and then share what they learn with the rest of us.

Continuous Deployment 68

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The new design improved on the old one in several ways, but these improvements didnt translate all the way through the funnel. Usually, I think that means youve lost some good aspect of the old design. The designers might be telling you that the new design looks much better than the old one, and thats probably true.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2010

And a special thanks is due to all of our presenters, panelists, and mentors. Kent Beck is deservedly famous for his many contributions in the software industry. Unfortunately, the video of our sllconf conversation is not online (due to technical problems), but we have a physical tape backup which we are endeavoring to get online soon.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 133

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

See Paul Grahams Why Nerds are Unpopular to learn more) Take a look at this article on a programming Q&A site: How old are you, and how old were you when you started coding? We also learned that law is code , and that leadership was needed to build thriving communities in a digital age. Can I send you a review copy?

Programming 143

Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

Im also excited to share two long-form reviews from actual attendees. Inspiring ideas: real-time biz metrics; safe continuous deployment; A/B split testing. You can learn more about that by reading The engineering managers lament.) More recently it's skewed to software & web. Articulate, inspirational.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Lean 113

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 5, 2010

When I wrote a review of Four Steps on this blog in November, 2008, I did my best to be candid and warn of a few shortcomings: And Steve is the first to admit that its a "turgid" read, without a great deal of narrative flow. Four Steps primarily centers its stories and case studies on B2B hardware and software startups.

Customer Development 166

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 166

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, May 14, 2009 The Lean Startup Workshop - now an OReilly Master Class My rate of posting has been much lower lately, and this is mostly due to preparations for the upcoming Lean Startup Workshop on May 29. This shift allowed us to crank out working software quickly as a service. It was a disaster.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review 60

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

In the old days, the brand manager of a consumer packaged goods product had to spend energy inferring the effectiveness of their television ads through a combination of trailing indicators (like market share) or time-consuming market research. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, February 11, 2009 The free software hiring advantage This is one of those startup tips Im a little reluctant to share, because its been such a powerful source of competitive advantage in the companies Ive worked with. Especially for a startup, not taking maximum advantage of free software is crazy.

Software Review 68

Software Review Software Hiring San Francisco 68

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

A new bit of code contained an infinite loop! why did that code get written? 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. Most engineers would ship code to production on their first day.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

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.

Continuous Deployment 131

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 131

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

Integration risk is the term I use to describe the costs of having code sitting on some, but not all, developers machines. It happens whenever youre writing code on your own machine, or you have a team working on a branch. It also happens whenever you have code that is checked-in, but not yet deployed anywhere.

Software Review 136

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

It connects to the internet to automatically download the necessary codes. Heres a representative view from an actual Amazon customer review : We all know how to operate our own entertainment center, but what happens when you have to explain it to your babysitter, mother-in-law, or your wife? They want to do activities.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 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. When I want to know about some concurrency issues between services in his cluster, he doesnt blink an eye when I suggest we get the source code and take a look.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration. I do this as a core part of the Product Management process I use at all startups. My experience is in Enterprise Software - where we are forced to chunk features into formal releases. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

One of the sayings I hear from talented managers in product development is, “good enough never is.&# Especially in teams that are managing by objectives (or OKRs), the pressure to deliver is intense. Good managers work hard to create an environment where this courage thrives. Rules of thumb can be infuriatingly unhelpful.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

The person running the meeting does not have to be a manager or executive. For example, a site outage may seem like it was caused by a bad piece of code, but: why was that code written? Five Whys is designed to avoid these nebulous arguments. In any event, nobody should hold a master position for too long.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Due to an interaction effect between your hardware, solar flares, and quantum flux, this virus will crash your computer and erase your hard drive sometime soon. In the past, we invested in brilliant architecture, code reuse, refactoring, modular design, etc. I have detected a secret virus in your CPU.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 3, 2009

When I was a manager, I was once leading a cycle post-mortem. At IMVU , these were quite common (after all, were shipping code 50 times a day). Richard Ackoff proposed a "Decision Record" model where managers write down their expectations for the outcomes from a strategy or course of action and their reasons why.

Employee 146

Employee San Francisco Lean Software Review 146

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

These successful startups managed to have enough tries to get it right. I believe it is a full, company-wide turn through the OODA loop (for a software business, see especially Ideas-Code-Learn ). You need a process for systematically reviewing your costs and eliminating those that slow you down.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

All I see is a name, an icon, a price, the developers name, and a review star-rating. The reviews are all over the map. But even clicking through to see a screenshot and some reviews is incredibly time consuming, given the hundreds of apps in most categories. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Distribution 74

Distribution San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 74

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

I had a lot of use for this concept back when I worked on game design and virtual worlds. In order to maintain game play balance, game designers have to take into account the needs of customers who have an excess of four different assets: time , money , skill , and passion. Having a balanced ecosystem is what game designers strive for.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

usersknow.blogspot.com

APRIL 30, 2010

I have contacted my customer service/community management team and prepped them with information about the new feature and asked them to get back to me if we start to see any significant new support requests. My code base can be changed or refactored to support major changes to the feature. Please plan for iteration.

Software Review 40

Software Review Agile San Francisco Advisory Board 40

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2008

The credit is due to much smarter people than me, and to the incredible power of necessity, that mother of invention. Some products, like Habbo Hotel or World of Warcraft, employ professional artists and designers to create compelling virtual goods that players want to buy. Heres what I mean. And what do you do with the rest?

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Insist on high levels of usability, UI design, and polish. Without conscious process design, product development teams turn lines of code written into momentum in a certain direction. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

Since then, PHP (as part of the LAMP stack ) has really been the dominant development platform, at least in the free software and startup worlds. When we started IMVU in 2004, we could rely on a staggering amount of open source software that jumpstarted our initial product offering. Every change required a server restart.

PHP 166

PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, September 11, 2009 The cardinal sin of community management Once you have a product launched, you will the face the joys – and the despair – of a community that grows up around it. Nothing worked, until we finally had one of our community managers start talking to real customers on the phone.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158