Book Review: “The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development” by Brant Cooper & Patrick Vlaskovits
I just finished reading this excellent extension of the work Steve Blank began in “Four Steps to the Epiphany” and I’m very impressed. Cooper and Vlakovits have taken a sometimes dense and weighty topic and made it accessible and actionable.
While not a replacement for 4 Steps I do find this work to be an essential addition to anyone creating a lean startup or considering and agile conversion at a company of any size.
As Ryan Martens, CTO and Founder of Rally Software says “agile can help you build the wrong product quickly.” The customer development methodologies help address this problem and help you identify the right product to build — often by having you build several products that turn out to be wrong.
You can get a copy of the book today at http://custdev.com. I highly recommend it.
What is a Lean Startup?
Sounding like you know what you’re talking about can be the first step to knowing what you’re talking about. In this series I help you understand terminology from the Agile/Lean/Web X.0 worlds.
Today’s Lesson: Lean Startup — A term coined by Eric Ries, lean startups are gaining ground in silicon valley.
More info: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_Startup and startuplessonslearned.com/
What is SaaS?
Sounding like you know what you’re talking about can be the first step to knowing what you’re talking about. In this series I help you understand terminology from the Agile/Lean/Web X.0 worlds.
Today’s Lesson: Software as a Service or SaaS for short. More info: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service and saas.com/
What is Lean?
Definitions for cocktail party credibility. Helping you sound like you know what you’re talking about.
Lean is a manufacturing philosophy that seeks to eliminate waste which is defined as any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer. It also seeks to increase quality by eliminating defects — which are also seen as waste.
More information: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing
What is Scrum?
Definitions for cocktail party credibility. Helping you sound like you know what you’re talking about.
More info: scrumalliance.org/
What is TDD?
Definitions for cocktail party credibility. Helping you sound like you know what you’re talking about.
Test Driven Development (TDD) isa practice developers use to increase quality and reduce bugs in software. It requires the writing of and automated test first and code second.
What is Agile?
Definitions for cocktail party credibility. Helping you sound like you know what you’re talking about.
Agile is not a technology or even a methodology. It is a way of viewing software development through a lens of complexity science. It favors collaboration, conversation and adaptability over rigid plans and structures. There are many Agile methodologies and technologies that have been developed but Agile itself is a philosophical framework.
More info: agilemanifesto.org/ and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development
Themes, Epics, Stories & Tasks: Review
Themes, Epics, Stories & Tasks: Review from Bob Gower on Vimeo.
It’s important that information be presented at the right level of granularity at the right time during the planning process. We use different semantic structures to present information at each stage to avoid an over abundance of detail during strategic sessions and too little information during tactical stages.
Themes, epics, stories and tasks when properly applied keep things simple and keep things moving.
Tasks
Tasks from Bob Gower on Vimeo.
Tasks are created by the development team during a sprint planning session and include all the specific work items that need to be finished in order to complete a specific story.
Stories should be tasked out and each task sized and understood before the team commits to doing the work in a single sprint. If a story is too big for a sprint then it should be broken into two or more stories by the dev team and tackled one at a time.
Stories
Stories from Bob Gower on Vimeo.
A story is a narrow piece of functionality that can be developed in a single sprint. It is a vertical slice through the application that actually adds functionality a user would notice and be able to take advantage of.
That said a story need not be valuable to a user in and of itself and will usually be part of a larger story called an Epic.
ABOUT BOB
I work with managers and executives at medium sized software companies that want to deliver software predictably on tight time-lines. I help implement Agile and Lean methods so that after working with me they are able to deliver quality software quickly and reliably.
Connect with me: 
bob@bobcanhelp.com | 415-517-6943