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Lessons Learned: Work in small batches

Startup Lessons Learned

Take the example of a design team prepping mock-ups for their development team. Give the dev team your very first sketches and let them get started. And over time, the development team may be able to start anticipating your needs. That frees up even more development resources, and so on.

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The Principles of Product Development Flow

Startup Lessons Learned

For example, heres him discussing our collective blindness to queues: To understand the economic cost of queues, product developers must be able to answer two questions. Today, only 2 percent of product developers measure queues. Second, what is the cost of these queues? First, how big are our queues?

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Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

Startup Lessons Learned

There are three fundamental situations that change what your company needs to do: creating a new market (the original Palm), bringing a new product to an existing market (Handspring), and resegmenting an existing market (niche, like In-n-Out Burger; or low-cost, like Southwest Airlines). What is customer development?

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Lessons Learned: Product development leverage

Startup Lessons Learned

The idea of leverage is simple: for every ounce of effort your product development team puts into your product, find ways to magnify that effort by getting many other people to invest along with you. It allowed me to assess the market demand for that offline product before I had the final product baked.

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Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

But when there is a task half-done, its actually slowing the team down. Imagine a team working from a forced-rank priority queue. Sometimes, a great hacker has the potential to grow into the CTO of a company, and in those cases all you need is an outside mentor who can work with them to develop those skills. Not necessarily.

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Lessons Learned: The engineering manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

I now believe that the "pick two" concept is fundamentally flawed, and that lean startups can achieve all three simultaneously: quickly bring high-quality software to market at low cost. Thats why we need continuous integration and test-driven development. First of all, its a myth that cutting corners saves time.