(2009-03-23) Ries Startup Iterate Experiment

Eric Ries emphasizes how Iterative development lets you test your Business Model. Referencing Steve Blank's Customer Development model. Agile Software Development is not always well adapted to the Start Up experience. That's not entirely surprising, because most agile methodologies have their roots in big companies (BigCo). They are specifically designed to build products in situations where the problem is known but the solution is unknown. Thus, they engage in rapid communication between the engineers and an authoritative in-house customer or Product Owner, who can give them fast resolution on feature decisions as they come up. This is a huge improvement over ever-more-detailed specification documents. But startups routinely face the problem that they don't even know what problem they are trying to solve... We were always convinced that the next feature we were about to ship would be "the big one" that would fix the product and help us make our paltry monthly revenue targets - only $300 a month in those early days. But these dreams of the instant fix never materialized. No one major release solved the problem, because the problem wasn't a lack of features. We eventually realized that our initial product concept, which had seemed so brilliant at the whiteboard, was fundamentally flawed. But because we took a disciplined approach to Learning we were able to find out before it was too late. Because we had tried every variation of features, had measured the behavior of the people we were bringing in, and were committed to a revenue plan, we were forced to change direction.