article thumbnail

[Interview] Michael K. Levine, Author Of “People Over Process: Leadership for Agility”

YoungUpstarts

I was an early adopter in financial operations and software of lean operational and product development techniques that originated at Toyota, and then of agile as it was promulgated in the Manifesto. I was one of four leaders of an enormous failed development project at Wells Fargo around 2007.

Agile 113
article thumbnail

How to Solve Problems in Your Business: Kanban, Kaizen and Scrum

Up and Running

The word kanban means “signboard” or “billboard” in Japanese, and it’s a concept most commonly applied to “lean” or “just in time” production. Kanban is a scheduling system for “just in time” production. Scrum: a flexible way to manage product development.

SCRUM 60
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 8, 2008 The lean startup Ive been thinking for some time about a term that could encapsulate trends that are changing the startup landscape. After some trial and error, Ive settled on the Lean Startup. I like the term because of two connotations: Lean in the sense of low-burn.

Lean 168
article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: Combining agile development with customer development

Startup Lessons Learned

XP and Scrum don’t have much to say - they punt. Its by far the hardest part of the puzzle of shipping successful products and both recommend that you get a customer in the room and ask them to clarify what they want as you go. Notice that the unit of progress changes as we move from waterfall to agile to the lean startup.

Agile 111
article thumbnail

Minimum Viable Persona – Get To Know Your Customers All Over Again

YoungUpstarts

Instead, we need to streamline and accelerate our processes by borrowing techniques from the world of lean and agile product development. That’s the power of the MVP, and of lean and agile approaches in general. The first step as we navigate our changing customer needs is to create a Minimum Viable Persona, or MVP.

SCRUM 162
article thumbnail

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

Startup Lessons Learned

I am convinced one of Joel Spolskys lasting contributions to the field of managing software teams will turn out to be the Joel Test , a checklist of 12 essential practices that you could use to rate the effectiveness of a software product development team. He wrote it in 2000, and as far as I know has never updated it.

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: The product manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

Eventually, I hope to get them on a full agile diet, with TDD, scrums, sprints, pair programming, and more. But first I think we need to save the product manager from that special form of torture only a waterfall product development team can create. Labels: product development 8comments: Vincent van Wylick said.