Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

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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San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

(Almost) everything you need to know (but are afraid to ask) before you wistfully ask a product manager to coffee so they will help you find a job. TL;DR Product management is a unique and poorly understood discipline, especially as it applies to software and other tech-related companies.

Management 85

Management Product Technical Review Software Review 85

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2017

5 in San Francisco) allows you to experience seven days of interactive innovation training from our experts and true Lean Startup practitioners —in a city that’s known for being the hotbed of high-growth startups and iconic tech companies (not to mention a great place to eat, drink, sightsee, and shop while you’re talking shop).

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Lean Programming San Francisco Cofounder 108

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp 2008, London) This presentation should be required reading for anyone creating a startup with an online service component. He also has a discussion of how your choice of business model determines which of these metric areas you want to focus on. Choose one.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

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. (See

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Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 4, 2010

Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. April 23, 2010 in San Francisco. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0,

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Agile Software Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 99

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 24, 2009 The metrics and levers of engagement, presentation on Engagement Loops for Facebook Developer Garage SF Ill be presenting a talk at the Facebook Developer Garage SF Wednesday evening. Unfortunately, its easy to lose track of positioning effects when optimizing for a single metric.

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Metrics San Francisco Lean Viral 88

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 2, 2010

Five Whys has its origins in the Toyota Production System. And yet the key to startup speed is to maintain a disciplined approach to testing and evaluating new products, features, and ideas. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? Speed up or slow down?

Technical Review 132

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 132

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, November 13, 2008 Five Whys Taiichi Ohno was one of the inventors of the Toyota Production System. His book Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production is a fascinating read, even though its decidedly non-practical. Each five whys email is a teaching document.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

This is the first post that moves into making specific process recommendations for product development. Everyone was in the flow; the team was hyper-productive. In many cases, they did the impossible, building a new product faster, cheaper, and better than anyone could have predicted.

Software Review 141

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

I was an engineer on the engineering team. The art team would often be involved in the specification phase of a new feature, since they were responsible for the look-and-feel of the product. For one, the engineers consider the artists stupid; the artists consider the engineers arrogant. The meeting was tense.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. Every startup has a chance to change the world, by bringing not just a new product, but an entirely new institution into existence. hey eric, love the blog.

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San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, September 13, 2008 SEM on five dollars a day How do you build a new product with constant customer feedback while simultaneously staying under the radar? Trying to answer that question at IMVU led me to discover Google AdWords and the world of search engine marketing. SEM is a simple idea.

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SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. But since I spent a long time in a hybrid CTO/VP Engineering role, I still have this nagging question. I want to add one last idea, even though I recognize it is controversial, bordering on the boundary between the CTO and VP Engineering. Heres my take.

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CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process.

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San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

As Steve writes in the Four Steps to the Epiphany , we always seek to find a market for the product as currently specified , not conduct a focus group to tell us what the spec should be. It gave the whole company license to go heads-down building product as fast as possible during the development cycle, acting as a solution team should.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Thats the conclusion Ive come to after watching tons of online products fail for a complete lack of customers. Our goal is to find out whether customers are interested in your product by offering to give (or even sell) it to them, and then failing to deliver on that promise. Nothing made any difference.

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Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Product development leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in product development. We didnt think wed able to compete with that.

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Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

It’s common, perhaps the norm, for startups to pivot like that—to discover that a product is catching on in unintended ways worth pursuing. With 21 employees today, kaChing is devoted to recruiting professional managers and finding product/market fit , first for money managers, then for consumers.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Build a truly mainstream product. Build the product in stealth mode to build buzz for the eventual launch. The whole company and board play-tested the product to see its new features first hand. Everyone had fun; the product worked. After years of engineering effort, changing these assumptions was incredibly hard.

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San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 16, 2009

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. But, over the years I’ve realized that the toughest problem - the one that matters most and was consistently the most challenging - was figuring out what the product backlog should be.

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Agile Customer Development Developer San Francisco 111

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 22, 2008 Thoughts on scientific product development I enjoyed reading a post today from Laserlike (Mike Speiser), on Scientific product development. I agree with the less is more product development approach, but for a different reason. So dont just kill the feature - iterate.

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Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 68

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 16, 2013

We work in prototypically four-week iterations, with quality engineers and software developers working in close collaboration. 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.

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Lean Startup Software Engineering Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

In my experience, the majority of changes we made to products have no effect at all on customer behavior. This kind of result is typical when you ship a redesign of some part of your product. Without split-testing, your product tends to get prettier over time. First of all, why split-test? One last note on reporting.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

He doesnt put out crappy, buggy products and then ask for feedback. My normal answer is that I dont really think thats how Apple products are built. Thats what so many techniques that I advocate are all about: customer validation , minimum viable product , vision pivots , and even throwing away working code. It just wasnt great.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile : "Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective. They work hard to keep their house in order at all times, and there are strict rules and guidelines in place that prevent engineers and teams from doing things their own way. Focus on launching.

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Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

As a result, for a lot of these companies, Boulder is just a gateway to San Francisco. Inspiring ideas: real-time biz metrics; safe continuous deployment; A/B split testing. You can learn more about that by reading The engineering managers lament.) TechStars encourages them to go wherever opportunities take them.

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San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Lean 113

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? April 23, 2010 in San Francisco. Bring your questions.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, October 11, 2009 Innovation inside the box I was recently privy to a product prioritization meeting in a relatively large company. The team spent an hour trying to decide on a new pricing strategy for their main product line. It was fascinating. The whole process had taken.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Metrics Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

I used to think that investments in metrics were a form of waste. Customers dont care if you have good metrics, only if you have a good product. The only reason we learned the art of metrics-based decision making at IMVU was out of necessity. We set sales targets from day one, $300 the first month.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 98

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2010

I had really debated about whether there was any value in spending the time and money to fly to San Francisco when there was a perfectly serviceable simulcast going on in Cleveland. All I can tell the folks who attended the simulcasts is that I’m not missing either the time or the money.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 133

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

No engineering team. But where it makes sense, that team may also include engineers building new experiments or prototypes to try with customers. And instead of design, engineering, QA, and operations we have a solution team implementing a startup-centric version of agile development. dalelarson : "Metrics are people, too."

San Francisco 132

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. April 23, 2010 in San Francisco. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0,

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San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

One of the sayings I hear from talented managers in product development is, “good enough never is.&# This is precisely the dilemma that the doctrine of minimum viable product is designed to solve. Almost everything we know today about how to build quality products in traditional management has its origins with W.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2010

Rich also organized the first Lean Startup Meetup right here in San Francisco. Rich also organized the first Lean Startup Meetup right here in San Francisco. April 23, 2010 in San Francisco. The SF Meetup now has over five hundred members, and has spawned many other meetup events. Bring your questions.

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Lean San Francisco Wiki Startup 146

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

Finding great engineers is hard; figuring out whos good is even harder. The technical interview is at the heart of these challenges when building a product development team, and so I thought it deserved an entire post on its own. For software engineers, I think this absolutely has to be a programming problem solved on a whiteboard.

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San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

One of the topics that raised heated debate was whether I had conflated technical design with product design , because I made the admittedly counter-intuitive claim that sometimes good technical design actually leads to increased technical debt. The argument itself got me thinking a lot about design and its role in building products.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87