What every developer can learn from startups

/me #1
Got hooked on startups at Riot-E
Search for “riot on” on YouTube
Startup cult member since
30+ companies total
expert on failure

/me #2
Do technical due diligence for investors
get paid to criticize other's work
Keen on JavaScript
the older I get, the more lazy I get

Why write code?

What drives developers?
Self actualization
Respect of others

What drives managers?
???
Profit

What drives customers?
Value (for money)

Software development is like ...

… Biological Systems
Evolving, interacting systems
… that nobody quite understands
Everything somehow still works
… but may end up being a monster

How do projects get started?
Somebody thinks they know what others want
raise -> build -> sell
Should validate their assumption first
sell -> build -> raise?

Be Lazy
The only projects that get delivered on time and according to spec are the ones that never get started at all

Customers #1
You're not in the service industry
The customer is not always right!
Learn how to say NO , excessive customer collaboration results in bloat
37signals vs. Salesforce

Customers #2
Don't build just for one customer
Discover product market fit
You're building a long term relationship

The Team
Communication overhead to be avoided at all costs, this increases exponentially with team size
Cross functional teams are great, but smaller teams of specialized generalists are better

Rockstars and Ninjas
Developer output varies by an order of magnitude, so finding the best developers (who are nice people) is key

Expectations
It's all about managing them
Very hard to do when requirements change
Almost always means more work
Burn-down & burn-up charts

Milestones
Needed to achieve sense of accomplishment and self worth
Needed for invoicing
Having something working badly is better than having nothing that works well

Embarrassment
“ If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late”
Reid Hoffmann, LinkedIn

Prototypes #1
Changes are easier to make early in the development cycle, but this gets progressively more difficult
Functional prototypes are great for conveying the big picture and user journey

Prototypes #2
Basis for a contract
You do need those sometimes
Works even when you are your own customer
Great for validating the customer

Features #1
Features are like sex
Less is more
Not every piece of work can be described as a story or a feature

Features #2
You can think through a feature without implementing it
You can build a feature without rolling it out

Modularity #1
Monolithic systems are hard to reason about
The Unix philosophy is the way forward
Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together.

Modularity #2
Creating reusable modules is the right thing to do
Despite having no visible benefit to end users
Because you don't always want to scrap everything

Open Source
Give away everything you can
Promotes your business
Recruiting tool
Motivational aid

Technical Debt
“ Eventual consequences of slapdash software architecture and hasty software development”
Do take on, as long as you know you're doing it

Failure
Failure is change
Embrace it
Learn from it
Know when to quit
Don't throw good money after bad

Distributed Teams
Increasing trend
Rockstars and Ninjas are on the road a lot
Meetings are evil
Tools can help

Operations & Metrics
Roll out updates quickly and often
Trust your developers
It's a numbers game
Track everything you can

Summary
This is not an exact science
Use whatever works for you
Think about the bigger picture
Enjoy the process, not the end goal

Thank you!
@olegpodsechin
github.com/olegp

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What every developer can learn from startups

by Oleg Podsechin on Sep 30, 2011

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What every developer can learn from startups Presentation Transcript