Quotes About Development

We have the capacity to build almost anything we can imagine. The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This

startup teams require three structural attributes: scarce but secure resources, independent authority to develop their business, and a personal stake in the outcome.

Process is only the foundation upon which a great company culture can develop.

Every setback is an opportunity for learning.

We've discussed the telltale signs of the need to pivot: the decreasing effectiveness of product experiments and the general feeling that product development should be more productive. Whenever you see those symptoms, consider a pivot.

The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible. In other words, the Lean Startup is a new way of looking at the development of innovative new products that emphasizes fast iteration and customer insight, a huge vision, and great ambition, all at the same time.

Contrary to traditional product development, which usually involves a long, thoughtful incubation period and strives for product perfection, the goal of the MVP is to begin the process of learning, not end it. Unlike a prototype or concept test, an MVP is designed not just to answer product design or technical questions. Its goal is to test fundamental business hypotheses.

the business and marketing functions of a startup should be considered as important as engineering and product development and therefore deserve an equally rigorous methodology to guide them.

are we making sufficient progress to believe that our original strategic hypothesis is correct, or do we need to make a major change?

Greg set out to change the QuickBooks development process by using four principles: 1. Smaller teams. Shift from large teams with uniform functional roles to smaller, fully engaged teams whose members take on different roles. 2. Achieve shorter cycle times. 3. Faster customer feedback, testing both whether it crashes customers' computers and the performance of new features/customer experience. 4. Enable and empower teams to make fast and courageous decisions.

thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible.

work-in-progress (WIP) inventory]

methodology Customer Development,

Lean Startup: the application of lean thinking to the process of innovation.

Bit by bit, system by system, those small investments added up to a robust product development process that allowed all our employees to work more creatively, with greatly reduced fear.

Teams steeped in traditional product development methods are trained to make go/kill decisions on a regular basis. That is the essence of the waterfall or stage-gate development model.

When I work with product managers and designers in companies that use large batches, I often discover that they have to redo their work five or six times for every release.

Functional specialists, especially those steeped in waterfall or stage-gate development, have been trained to work in extremely large batches. This causes even good ideas to get bogged down by waste. By making the batch size small, the sandbox method allows teams to make cheap mistakes quickly and start learning.

of work. Over that period, we were making constant improvements to the

Every successful product or feature began life in research and development (R&D), eventually became a part of the company's strategy, was subject to optimization, and in time became old news.

Until we could figure out how to sell and make the product, it wasn't worth spending any engineering time on.

The problem for startups and large companies alike is that employees often follow the products they develop as they move from phase to phase. A common practice is for the inventor of a new product or feature to manage the subsequent resources, team, or division that ultimately commercializes it. As a result, strong creative managers wind up getting stuck working on the growth and optimization of products rather than creating new ones.

You can't take learning to the bank; you can't spend it or invest it. You cannot give it to customers and cannot return it to limited partners.

Our goal in building products is to be able to run experiments that will help us learn how to build a sustainable business. Thus, the right way to think about the product development process in a Lean Startup is that it is responding to pull requests in the form of experiments that need to be run.