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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. I met one recently that is working on a really innovative product, and the stories I heard from their development team made me want to cringe.

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Lessons Learned: Combining agile development with customer development

Startup Lessons Learned

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. The breakthrough idea of agile is that software should be built iteratively, with the pieces that customers value most created first. Customer Development - The Missing Piece!

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Lessons Learned: A new version of the Joel Test (draft)

Startup Lessons Learned

I am convinced one of Joel Spolskys lasting contributions to the field of managing software teams will turn out to be the Joel Test , a checklist of 12 essential practices that you could use to rate the effectiveness of a software product development team. For more on continuous deployment, see Just-in-time Scalability.

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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. Of course, many startups are capital efficient and generally frugal. No more, no less.

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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

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. Unfortunately, customers hated that initial product.

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Lessons Learned: Built to learn

Startup Lessons Learned

But that team may also include product marketers or other in-house customers who can give insight into the impact that solution trade-offs might have on customers. Its not good enough to hit product milestones and conduct usability tests. dalelarson : "Metrics are people, too." Only the truly visionary customers will engage early-on.

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The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part three

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, December 6, 2008 The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part three Those startups that manage to build a product people want have to deal with the consequences of that success. And still being a startup means continuing to innovate as well as keep the lights on.