Tag: product development
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Ad-Hoc Usability Testing With Craiglist Users #leanstartup
At Food on the Table, feedback from real users is the life-blood of how they do lean startup. When we needed qualatiative feedback from new users, one way was to hire people off of craigslist – a form of ad-hoc usability testing. This question has come up so often, I promised to share the answer…
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Moving on from Food on the Table & What’s Next!
It’s been a great 3 1/2 years at Food on the Table, however it’s time for me to move on. As you’d expect with a team and investors of this caliber, everyone has been very supportive of my decision. While this next phase will be without me, I remain confident that the work at Food…
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How would you benchmark the productivity of a lean-startup product development team?
How would you benchmark the productivity of a product-development team in lean-startup? Why? In my experience at Food on the Table, we’ve been much more productive than any of the other early-stage startups I’ve been involved with. I believe that one of the causes is our pervasive use of lean-startup & feel as if we’re on…
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Progress Trackers in Web Design: Examples and Best Practices – Smashing Magazine
Gotta love this… Progress Trackers in Web Design: Examples and Best Practices – Smashing Magazine.
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kanban development oversimplified + shiny bits on couchdb
Lots of buzz lately about kanban / lean in software development. While watching this from the sidelines, I’ve also been looking at my current team and previous teams and gauging applicability. With my current team (at FiveRuns), we hit a point a while ago where the team began to reject the extra formality and overhead in some…
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Webcast: How to Build a Lean Startup, step-by-step
O’Reilly and Eric Ries are doing an interesting webcast – Webcast: How to Build a Lean Startup, step-by-step. Having recently waded into this end of the pool – I’m getting a lot out of the whole lean startup idea. No great surprise, since it extends what I’m familiar with, from within product development, to all the…
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Oh CouchDB, Why Do I Love Thee So…?
Ok, so why are my friends and co-workers noticing my minor obsession about CouchDB? There’s a few reasons. First, I have a long-term unlove-affair with RDBMS. Why? I started off working in the UNIX kernel (V6 anyone?) and there’s no stinking databases in there… just some filesystem stuff After learning and using C, I jumped…
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Rails, Ruby and other Open Source Components – Better During the Downturn?
With the economic downturn, financial pressures increases on technologuy budgets (whether commercial, large / small enterprise, startup or non-profit).Increased productivity + open source + prevalence in the ‘cloud’ (regardless of your definition of ‘cloud’) bodes well for the Rails + Ruby eco-system.I’m biased, as are the rest of us at FiveRuns – but we’re not the only ones saying this.Â
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FiveRuns
I haven’t even noted anything different here – but on Oct 1st ‘07, I joined FiveRuns as their VP of Development and Technology. A lot is brewing there, and the fruits of of our work will be visible soon. Recently, I’ve begun to blog there as well. On occasion, I’ll link through from here to…
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Infrastructure
So in the physical world, there’s tremendous constraints placed on a system by existing infrastructure. It defines and limits what can be done without significant extra resources expended – which means cost, complexity, risk, etc. In a recent issue of Wired, there’s an article about how a new city in China is being designed with…
Steve Sanderson 