A presentation from New Orleans Entrepreneur Week 2014 by Peter Bodenheimer of FlatStack & Barrett Conrad of CotingaSoft. The goal of this presentation was help bridge the gap often found between business founders and the technical partners helping them execute their product development vision.

1. Software Development
to
Help You End Up
with the
Product You Really Want
Peter Bodenheimer
peter@flatstack.com
@pbodenheimer
Barrett Conrad
bconrad@cotingasoft.com
@barrettconrad

2. UX Tech
Business
You want to be here
You are probably here

4. Definition is a shared process.
!
Work happens outside of meetings.
Iteration means not trying to jam
everything in at once.
Building a great product requires being
in it for the long haul.

5. Software doesn’t take a long time to build.
Good software takes a long time.

7. Are you a technology company or a
technology enabled company?

9. –Agile Manifesto
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

10. Iteration

14. “Predefined period of development
with set goals, expectations and time frames.”

16. Stakeholders
Product Owner
Scrum Master
Team Lead
Team Members

19. Development
Process

20. $&!*#&@*

21. The Sprint
Plan with your team
Get full team agreementWork!
Deliver and review
Repeat

22. Daily Stand-ups
!
• A standing team meeting for 10-15 minutes at the
beginning of each work-day during a sprint.
• Each person quickly answers the following questions:
A. What did you do yesterday?
B. What are you doing today?
C. Do you have roadblocks or need help from anyone?

24. “If you can’t decide whether
or not you need a feature….!
You don’t!”
Mike McDerment
Founder & CEO
of Freshbooks

25. “Every option in a piece of
software is someone’s
failure to make a decision.”
Joel Spolsky*
Founder & CEO of Fog
Creek Software, Stack
Overflow, & Trello
* We Think

27. Technology

28. Tech Rules!
• Don’t try to scale 0.
• Understand technical debt
• Modern is good. Bleeding edge is just that.
• Use frameworks, API, plugins, etc, but be able to say
‘yes’ later.
• Beware of magic.
• Language, Shlanguage.

29. Language. Shlanguage.
* I’m required by law to bash Cobol
Tech EnabledTech
“Good”
“Bad”
C#/.NET
Python
C/C++
Go
Node.js
Cobol
Cold Fusion
Erlang
Haskell
Clojure
Java
Scala
JavaScript
PHP
Ruby

30. Go (Iteratively) Build
Something!
Peter Bodenheimer
peter@flatstack.com
@pbodenheimer
Barrett Conrad
bconrad@cotingasoft.com
@barrettconrad