Today I had one of those impromptu meetings with someone I just got introduced to last week by email — and it ended up being a real highlight of my day.
Eric Ries is a young engineer and entrepreneur who is well beyond his years in the way he thoughtfully thinks and talks about how to approach product development in a startup environment. A lot of Eric’s thoughts and related links about how he sees the application of Agile product development can be found at his blog “Lessons Learned”.
I hope Eric doesn’t get mad that I picked a photo of him in a tie! He was much more casually dressed when we met at Peet’s this afternoon.
One of the interesting points we were both in agreement on is the importance of developing really rapid iterative product development loops that quickly churn out new revs of a product or service and solicit customer feedback in a way that can inform the next rev.
Why is this so critical? Well, in today’s environment the big monster staring down most startups is “time” — or the lack of it to be precise. For any company running with a negative net burn, the race is to crack the code on what your customers want and how to turn that into revenue.
I like the Italian kitchen metaphor: you need to be throwing a lot of spagehtti against the wall early on to see what sticks. And the only way to throw a lot of spaghetti is to be able to reach in to the pot and fire it quickly against the wall…over and over again.
So if you want a fresh perspective on product development take a read of Eric’s blog.
Originally published on Medium on March 16, 2009. This Substack version is maintained as the canonical archive.