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Lessons Learned: The product manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, October 5, 2008 The product managers lament Life is not easy when youre working in an old-fashioned waterfall development process, no matter what role you play. The product manager was clearly struggling to get results from the rest of the team. Frustration is mounting.

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Lessons Learned: Work in small batches

Startup Lessons Learned

Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. Normally I focus on the techniques you need to reduce batch size, like continuous integration.

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Lessons Learned: The engineering manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. This engineering manager is a smart guy, and very experienced.

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The Principles of Product Development Flow

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of Product Development Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Managing timelines instead of queues. Inflexibility.

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Lean Startup at Scale

Startup Lessons Learned

This finally bit us after a four month stint of development blew through its testing schedule by a factor of four: two scheduled weeks turned into two months before the product reached stability. Software development is all about managing complexity and the bigger and more mature the codebase gets, the more complex it gets.

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Datablindness

Startup Lessons Learned

You constantly assess the situation, looking for hazards and timing your movements carefully to get across safely. So the product development team was busy creating lots of split-tests for lots of hypotheses. Each day, the analytics team would share a report with them that had the details of how each test was doing.

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

Startup Lessons Learned

Id like to talk about a technique Ive used to help manage this growth without slowing down. This technique rests on three things: identifying the kinds of work that need to get done, creating the right type of teams for each kind, and steering the company by allocating resources among them. What is customer development?