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Why diversity matters

by Eric Ries, March 1, 2010 | Comments

Diversity is the canary in the coal mine for meritocracy

Diversity is the canary in the coal mine for meritocracy. As entrepreneurs, more than any other industry, we’re in the meritocracy business. The companies that make decisions based on merit, rather than title, politics, or hierarchy execute faster and learn faster than their competitors. For startups (and other innovators), that’s a decisive advantage.So when a team lacks diversity, that’s a ...

Beware of vanity metrics

by Eric Ries, February 15, 2010 | Comments

Follow three A's of metrics - actionable, accessible, auditable

The next article in my series on entrepreneurship for Harvard Business Review is live today. Once again, we revisit the topic of Actionable metrics and their nemesis: Vanity metrics. Any entrepreneur with a decent reality distortion field can find metrics that make it look like they're being successful. This "success theater" is occasionally useful for PR or getting through a ...

A real customer advisory board

by Eric Ries, October 29, 2009 | Comments

The technique of having customers produce a "state of the company" progress report

A reader recently asked on a previous post about the technique of having customers periodically produce a “state of the company” progress report. I consider this an advanced technique, and it is emphatically not for everyone.Many companies seek to involve customers directly in the creation of their products. This is a lot harder than it sounds. Hearing occasional input is ...

Innovation inside the box

by Eric Ries, October 19, 2009 | Comments

The sandbox is an area of the product where certain rules are strictly enforced

I was recently privy to a product prioritization meeting in a relatively large company. It was fascinating. The team spent an hour trying to decide on a new pricing strategy for their main product line. One of the divisions, responsible for the company’s large accounts, was requesting data about a recent experiment that had been conducted by another division. They ...

The cardinal sin of community management

by Eric Ries, September 25, 2009 | Comments (1)

How to listen to the joys and despairs of a community growing around your product

Once you have a product launched, you will the face the joys – and the despair – of a community that grows up around it. I won’t sugar-coat this: it is one of the most difficult and frustrating aspects of building a company online.There are many articles by many experts (myself included) extolling the virtues of listening to customers. In ...

The principles of product-development flow

by Eric Ries, July 28, 2009 | Comments

Complete more cycles of learning to generate more information in each cycle

If you've ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen is the book for you. It's quite simply the most advanced product development book you can buy.For those who hunger for a rigorous approach to managing product development, Donald Reinertsen's book is epic. Myths ...

Pivot, don't jump to a new vision

by Eric Ries, June 25, 2009 | Comments

Place one foot in the past, and place another in a new possible future

In a lean startup, instead of being organized around traditional functional departments, we use a cross-functional problem team and solution team. Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. And the two teams are joined together into a company-wide feedback loop that allows the whole company to be built to learn. This combination allows startups to ...

Why continuous deployment?

by Eric Ries, June 16, 2009 | Comments

It encourages learning and teams that deploy it get faster over time

Of all the tactics I have advocated as part of the lean startup, none has provoked as many extreme reactions as continuous deployment, a process that allows companies to release software in minutes instead of days, weeks, or months. My previous startup, IMVU, has used this process to deploy new code as often as an average of fifty times a ...

Data blindness

by Eric Ries, June 11, 2009 | Comments

It's a disability that many people find refreshingly comfortable

Most of us are swimming in a sea of data about our products, companies, and teams. Too much of this data is non-actionable. That’s because many of our reports feed us vanity metrics: numbers that make us look good but don’t really help make decisions.Yet even among those who have access to good actionable metrics, I’ve noticed a phenomenon that ...

It's a startup, not a spreadsheet

by Eric Ries, June 10, 2009 | Comments

Startups require a constant balancing act between execution and learning

Some people, when they start to realize the power of using data to inform their decisions, become obsessed with optimization. I think this idea is particularly appealing to those of us from an engineering background. By reducing the decisions we have to make to a series of quantitative questions, we can avoid a lot of real-life messiness. Unfortunately, most decisions ...

Fear is the mind-killer

by Eric Ries, May 19, 2009 | Comments

Fear-reduction strategy: Reduce consequences; fear early, fear often

Fear is an emotion that slows teams down. It makes us more cautious. It makes us over-invest in prevention. It makes us less willing to trust, to communicate openly, and - most painfully - to take risks. It is the dominant reason I see teams fall back on "best practices" which may not be effective, but are at least reassuring. ...

Cash is not king

by Eric Ries, March 31, 2009 | Comments (2)

What matters most is the number of iterations the company has left

Cash on hand is just one important variable in a startup’s life, but it’s not necessarily the most important. What matters most is the number of iterations the company has left. While some cost-cutting measures reduce that number, others increase it. In lean times, it’s most important to focus on cutting costs in ways that speed you up, not slow ...

The metrics and levers of engagement

by Eric Ries, March 25, 2009 | Comments

Get customers to see your service as the No. 1 source for a given category

I'll be presenting a talk at the Facebook Developer Garage SF Wednesday evening. You can learn more about the event here. It's hosted by Kontagent and sponsored by Intel. Most of the content for my presentation is drawn from my original article on engagement loops, with new diagrams courtesy of my friends at Kontagent and a few new examples. Without ...

When should startups launch?

by Eric Ries, March 17, 2009 | Comments

	Don't launch; resist the urge Here's a common question I get from startups, especially in the early stages: when should we launch? My answer is almost always the same: don't.First off, what does it mean to launch? Generally, we conflate two unrelated concepts into the term, which is important to clarify right up front.Announce a new product, start its PR campaign, and engage in buzz ...
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Employees should be masters of their time

by Eric Ries, March 10, 2009 | Comments

This startup rule requires radical transparency, but results in alignment in thinking

Every startup should have a culture of learning. That's easy to write, and I forgive anyone out there who thinks that is too much of a platitude to any meaning. I'm also skeptical of people who suggest "changing the culture" as a prescription to fix a company's problems, because that just begs the question of how company cultures change. Without ...

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Eric Ries
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IMVU (Owner)

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