As a talk to iVentures 10 companies that took place at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, I discussed agile/scrum as a product development approach for small startups.

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New Product
Development
For Startup Companies

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Sean Eby
Co-Founder, Poll Everywhere, YC funded,
2007
Lead Developer, ShopLocal.com, 2007-
2008
Consultant, Deloitte Consulting, 2004-2007
Northern Illinois University, B.S. CSCI,
2001-2004

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Waterfall?

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Embrace
constraints
Time
Cos
t
Scop
e
e.g. $10K
10 weeks
The variable

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Requirements will change, even drastically
Working functionality sooner
Frequent product/prototype updates
Emphasis on face-to-face interactions
Emphasis on including the customer (or
product owner)
Continuous improvement
Agile Approach

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Sprinting with
Scrum

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Backlog

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Sprint Planning

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Daily Scrum
What did you do
yesterday?
What will you do
today?
Is anything in your
way?

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Sprint Demo
Show off your work: To co-founders or to
customers/clients!
Partially completed tasks are ignored (they
weren’t done!)
Agree with each other on “Definition of
Done”

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Sprint
Retrospective

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Important
considerations
Listening to the market
Adaptability to change, self-reflection
Setting Vision/Elevator Pitch w/ co-
founder(s)
Businesses are supposed to make money
Customer development -- Steve Blank