Remove Customer Remove Customer Development Remove Engineer Remove SCRUM
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Lessons Learned: Combining agile development with customer development

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customer development Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. 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.

Agile 111
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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

Lean 168
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Lessons Learned: A new version of the Joel Test (draft)

Startup Lessons Learned

At IMVU , our engineering team accumulated thousands upon thousands of tests, and we had a build cluster (using BuildBot ) that ran them. There are several ways to make progress evident - the Scrum team model is my current favorite. You can keep the team focused on customer-centric results, rather than conformance to spec.

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Lessons Learned: The product manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

The VP Engineering spends all of his time trying to make sure the programmers understand and implement the spec. Eventually, I hope to get them on a full agile diet, with TDD, scrums, sprints, pair programming, and more. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. Unfortunately, customers hated that initial product. For example, at a previous virtual world company , we spent years developing an architecture to cope with millions of simultaneous users. Leverage product development with open source and third parties.

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Lessons Learned: ScienceDaily: Corporate culture is most important.

Startup Lessons Learned

At IMVU , we called this person a Producer (revealing our games background); in Scrum , they are called the Product Owner. Thus the power of the Chief Engineer is very large even though he (and they are all men so far) has no direct reports other than a secretary and a few assistants who are themselves being trained to be chief engineers.

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Lessons Learned: Built to learn

Startup Lessons Learned

Rather than use boring section headers, I thought Id just quote from actual customers, in their own words. Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customer development , the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop , and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience.