Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Hes a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD So far, this isnt much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. For my first time, it was scalability problems and our operations team. Now, everyone is learning together - about your product, process, and team.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. As the company grows, this kind of work generalizes into "executing the companys current strategy." Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you? ScienceDaily: Corporate culture is most important.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2010

In management jobs related to operations – that is, the people tasked with actually making and distributing physical products – this kind of thinking is now considered ludicrous, thanks to a century of progress. Probably not; it’s much easier to blame the particular person who made the mistakes.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Management Founder Lean 161

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Customer development is a parallel process to product development, which means that you dont have to give up on your dream. Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers. This is a common mistake. Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you? ScienceDaily: Corporate culture is most important. The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: Five Whys Where did Silicon Valley come from? . Take a look and let me know what you think.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

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. Leverage product development with open source and third parties.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

So the product development team was busy creating lots of split-tests for lots of hypotheses. That’s causing the Product Owner and team to spend more time with each other reviewing the results of experiments, which is allowing them to learn and iterate much faster. They’ve learned to see this waste.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

The economics of these process trade-offs are discussed in the Principles of Product Development Flow.) Heres an excerpt: In a previous article, we called Toyota’s product development system the “second Toyota paradox.&# Labels: product development 5comments: new york web development company said.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. Good luck, engineering manager. It was painful for a lot of people.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 22, 2008 Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to measure customer satisfaction Ive mentioned Net Promoter Score (NPS) in a few previous posts, but havent had a chance to describe it in detail yet. Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you? ScienceDaily: Corporate culture is most important.

.Net 158

.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

Maybe two different developers made changes to the same underlying subsystem, but in incompatible ways. Maybe operations has changed the OS configuration in production in a way that is incompatible with some developers change. The reason its a risk is that, until you integrate, you dont know if the code is going to work.

Software Review 136

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Have you met that prickly operations guy who seems to love servers more than people (but would never let them fail on his watch)? Even worse, in my opinion, is that I know there are at least a few readers out there who read the previous paragraph and thought, "those arent hard choices to make; its obvious what you should choose."

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

I believe its important that product teams be cross-functional, no matter what other job function the product champion does. Its even more critical in lean startups when they need to manage growth. Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you? ScienceDaily: Corporate culture is most important. Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

For example, lets say you dont have an operations team, and so youre still getting paged late at night when servers crash. Is it time to make your first operations hire? Returning to our example of the beleaguered founder who still has the pager, before hiring an operations guy, try promoting someone from within to take on the job.

Lean 140

Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

So instead of having sales, marketing, and business development, we have a problem team implementing customer development. And instead of design, engineering, QA, and operations we have a solution team implementing a startup-centric version of agile development. Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 132

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 6, 2008

When youve mastered that, consider adding operations, customer service, marketing, product management, business development - the idea is that when the team needs to get approval or support from another department, they already have an "insider" who can make it happen. Keep the team size small, maybe just two or three people.

San Francisco 74

San Francisco SCRUM Lean Continuous Deployment 74

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Thats a perfectly reasonable reaction, given that most releases of most products are bad news. Even worse, the sad state of product development generally means that the new "features" are as likely to be ones that make the product worse, not better. Its likely that the new release will contain new bugs.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

The idea was that these two people would operate as a unit, with the mentors job performance during this period evaluated by the performance of the new person. Because this was such a big cultural change for most new employees, we didnt leave them to sink or swim on their own. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Continuous Deployment 131

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 131

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

One large source of waste in development is “double-checking.&# For example, imagine a team operating in a traditional waterfall development system, without continuous deployment, test-driven development, or continuous integration. When a developer wants to check-in code, this is a very scary moment.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 18, 2010 Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases non-events The following is a case study of one entrepreneurs transition from a traditional development cycle to continuous deployment. Many people still find this idea challenging, even for companies that operate solely on the web.

Continuous Deployment 151

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Wiki 151

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

these devices all need human instruction to enable correct and desired operation. @drhowarddrfine: the goal of the project is *not* to turn *everyone* into programmers but to introduce a vital skill that's applicable to all walks of life and professions. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Programming 143

Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

I'll add two ideas: The modern structure of university patent licensing and technology transfer works really well in the life sciences and other fields with expensive product development processes. September 9, 2009 7:00 AM Anonymoussaid. Ease the process for startups to get access to global talent.

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

I’ve seen many times what happens when a single department get’s holed-up in its own space, like the terrifying “ operations cave.&# I’ve seen many times what happens when a single department get’s holed-up in its own space, like the terrifying “ operations cave.&#

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Im talking about the actual data-fetching operation. This information is normally maintained by your operations team. A given customer would have an entity URL that looked like this: customer://1234 Somewhere in your API, you have a way to access data about a given customer. You need to store two kinds of information.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Heres a representative view from an actual Amazon customer review : We all know how to operate our own entertainment center, but what happens when you have to explain it to your babysitter, mother-in-law, or your wife? Before this remote, I had a Sony RM-AV3000. Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you? ScienceDaily: Corporate culture is most important. The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: Five Whys Where did Silicon Valley come from? . Take a look and let me know what you think.

Campaign 84

Campaign San Francisco Lean Agile 84

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 21, 2008

Lean startups operate by a different standard. aka "how you get to product/market fit.") Toyota employs something called "set-based product development" where they develop multiple versions of a product at once. Lean startups operate by a different standard." Experimentation is not necessarily waste.

Lean 121

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 121

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

But I think debates about which language, which operating system, even which editor (emacs, vim, Visual Studio) can go on forever. However, it made me remember that Im tired of technology arguments. Dont get me wrong, the right tool should be used for the right problem. Take a look and let me know what you think.

PHP 166

PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 23, 2009

Pretty soon you’re chasing your own tail a little bit because you’re not operating against a clear, long-term vision of what you’re trying to accomplish. Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Audio 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Companies want the coverage, but they don’t actually want to reveal anything useful about their operations. Companies want the coverage, but they don’t actually want to reveal anything useful about their operations. The solution? Vanity metrics. Is that really news? The solution? Vanity metrics. Is that really news?

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Metrics Lean PR 154

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you? ScienceDaily: Corporate culture is most important. The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: Five Whys Where did Silicon Valley come from? . Take a look and let me know what you think.

Advertising 60

Advertising San Francisco Media Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

FYI the surveymonkey link isnt operational. November 19, 2008 5:57 PM McElroy Flavelle said. Hi Erik, Im a independent games producer based in Vancouver. No idea how I found your blog but I follow it with my Google Reader. November 24, 2008 2:44 PM Eric said. Thanks for letting me know. Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

Twenty years from now, operating systems might also work as a good metaphor. However, attempting to slot a market stereotype matrix on to the environment in which your start-up operates isnt always going to be particularly fruitful. Trendy image, DVD and a successful pre-cursor. Innovative, Auntie-friendly controller, etc.

San Francisco 89

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 20, 2009

They started building BASIC interpreters, but evolved into the worlds largest operating systems monopoly. Each of these companies were fortunate to have enough time, resources, and patience to endure the multiple iterations it took to find a successful product and market. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you? ScienceDaily: Corporate culture is most important. The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: Five Whys Where did Silicon Valley come from? . Take a look and let me know what you think.

Silicon Valley 68

Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

It took hundreds of years for newspapers to learn to behave as worthy holders of this public trust and cover the news without fear or favour, and create a firewall between news and views and the ad-sales side of the operation. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158