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Lessons Learned: Work in small batches

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, February 20, 2009 Work in small batches Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches. Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. Take the example of a design team prepping mock-ups for their development team.

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HOW TO: Hire the Perfect CTO

mashable.com

With development teams often based around the world, being the center of communication and progress can either lead to a tremendously successful strategy or a bottleneck that can slow down an entire company. Organization and Execution Your new CTO should be able to handle your development team so that projects run along smoothly.

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Lessons Learned: The product manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

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. The product manager was clearly struggling to get results from the rest of the team. These specs are handed to a designer, who builds layouts and mockups of all the salient points.

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HOW TO: Build an App for Your Small Business

mashable.com

Also make sure that you’re communicating well with any web developers or designers you hire. Have appropriate expectations, listen to the professionals in your employ and don’t micro-manage a design or development project. One of the biggest keys to getting great work is being a great client.

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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. It was pretty ugly, the marketing and design sucked, and I was embarrassed by it. So the product development team was busy creating lots of split-tests for lots of hypotheses. Yet it had one huge advantage.

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

Startup Lessons Learned

Now its time to start to think seriously about how to find a repeatable and scalable sales process, how to position and market the product, and how to build a product development team that can turn an early product into a Whole Product. What is customer development? Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online.

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Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

Startup Lessons Learned

You can learn about customer development, and quite a bit more, in Steves book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. This is a self-published book, originally designed as a companion to Steves class at Berkeleys Haas school of business. Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers.