I’ve been doing engineering consulting in fractional CTO roles for about a year now. And my current work is vastly different from my previous work ...
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This is exactly what killed the Startup I worked for after university.
We created a huge list of features, designed everything in a perfect waterfall manner. We developed almost two years without ever having a paying customer. It was a great architecture, as you said “perfect”, but it was not what the customer needed.
In fact, customers only needed 5% of the features that we could have delivered 1,5years earlier.
Building something in an agile way, starting with the most valuable parts and getting frequent customer feedback could have saved the company.
I still think it was a good idea…
I suspect we, as developers, should stress the proper agile values more. Following the simple principles of the agile manifesto would avoid all the 3 mistakes highlighted in this article and more.
I worked for companies where agile meant just chaotic anarchic addition of features based on what the single developer liked to hack or projects focused on filling up the agile management tool fields in a way developers thought top managers wanted to read.
Yes!
After working for this company for about a year, I figured that our whole product development „process“ does not work.
I started reading about XP back in the days and thought this is exactly what we need.
I tried to convince our CEO to give it a try. He thought Agile means „developers do what they want when they want and you’ll never know when anything is done“.
Sadly, I wasn’t experienced enough to convince him of the opposite. I just got another well-payed job and left. 3 months after the company was bankrupt and the CEOs personal and financial life was devastated.
That would definitely help!
Very common story - thanks for sharing!
Excellent points! As a many-years tech-type I’m still amazed by how ‘entrepreneurs’ can develop ideas and get money (sometimes lots of money!) with no real evidence of what might sell.
All these points say get something out there (that shows the basic service) ASAP to see if people will use it/pay for it. If I were a VC I’d require every proposal to be based on the Door Dash story.
Totally - I love how Door Dash handled their MVP!
Can relate. Reddit sucks.
haha yup
Yup!
I keep reminding less-experienced devs, Code is a wiki. It's constantly honed over time by the "crowd" that is your devs.
100%!
Great! And make sure the POC works well. I have seen so many startups fail because they were faster than their own thoughts.
100% Eszter!
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Keep it up 👍
Yessss .... thank you!
Big corporations make these three mistakes at the project level.
Long story short don't aim for perfection. Try to build your start up based on passion and the interest of solving a problem. Whenever you aim to meet demands you will always fall short.
Pretty much!
I'm just one guy, learning how to build an app for a single user, and keeping these three things in mind will be very helpful. Thanks!
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