Recently I was in a meeting with one of our clients at AgilityFeat. The project lead at the client made a simple, but very powerful statement as we presented an assessment and proposal. “One of our challenges is that we need to learn to...
Early in 2013, I was sitting on a beach in Costa Rica with the AgilityFeat team. Also with me was an author and visionary we hired to come work with our team for a couple days. That visionary was Patrick Vlaskovits, co-author of “The Lean...
Last year I blogged about how my friend Matt Makai is starting a 5 month journey to blog and code his way around the US. I'm excited for Matt that this journey has begun! You can follow him at CodingAcrossAmerica.com, and on Twitter....
How's your year going? Ours has been crazy-busy. That means we haven't blogged as much as we'd like over the last month, but nonetheless we've got some important and hard-learned lessons to share with you. We've just gone through a period...
Not every project is going to run smoothly, even in the best of teams. We have a great team here at AgilityFeat, and we’re very selective when choosing our customers, so our projects tend to be very successful. But every team is going to...
Whether you are a bleeding edge startup or a large corporation running agile teams, here are four ways that you may be abusing agile concepts and letting perfection kill your chances of success. Product Owner Perfection In an agile team,...
Project on-boarding is key to success Step two is always a question mark. It’s one of my favorite meme’s on the internet. Some joker on a message board will say they have a great idea, and their business plan usually goes something like...
In our first “news from the startup front” of 2013, our code commandos have a lot of great stories to share with you - and more coming! We've done interviews with 3 great lean startups (Twilio, LaunchBit, and Change.org), so please join...
AgilityFeat recently held a great event in Costa Rica called DareToBeLean, where we invited entrepreneurs to join us on the beach for workshops on lean startups and agility. As we were planning that event in the fall of 2012, I looked at...
My background is technical, not in sales. But as a lean entrepreneur, I have to wear my sales and marketing hat more than I wear my programmer hat these days. So I was excited when I could make it to this month’s DC Lean Startup Circle....
"Wave coming, wave coming ... paddle! paddle! paddle! Now stand up! Stand up! GET UP!" I can still hear the voice of my surf instructor, and those lessons provide a great parallel to the growth of my company and yours. Surfing and...
How do you convince engineers that it’s okay to build quick experiments, and deploy code that you will probably throw away? How do you convince rigorous engineers that it’s actually more efficient to work in a lean startup style? That is...
The Ignite talks at the Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco in December were a lot of fun, both as an attendee and as a speaker. Below is the video of my talk on "Just Deploy It!". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEsk8Nfwfck In my...
Who’s ever heard of a telecom lean startup? That’s sort of what Twilio is, and it’s a pretty cool company and interesting case study. When I attended the LeanStartup.co conference in San Francisco recently, one of the parts I was most...
Wow, this year has flown by! In our final “news from the startup front” of 2012, our code commandos have been thinking a lot lately about Lean Startups, nearshoring, and our upcoming workshop in Tamarindo, Costa Rica. There's lots of...
AgilityFeat is hiring an agile engineering coach! Well, sort of. You see … here’s the deal. AgilityFeat does two things: (1) custom software development in Costa Rica, and (2) agile process and engineering coaching and training for...
The LeanStartup.co conference was great, and internally at AgilityFeat we are still incorporating some of the lessons that our team learned by participating in the conference. As a bookmark to myself, and perhaps useful to you too, I'm...
What's the best conference that you've ever been to? For me, the 2012 Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco is definitely the best one that I've been to so far. It was my favorite as a speaker, where I did a short Ignite talk on...
Yesterday, I went to The Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco. It was a full day of incredible presentations, fireside chats (without the fires), sharing of lessons learned and of course networking. This was my first Lean Startup...
Here are the slides that I used last night at the Lean Startup Conference's Ignite talks. I am indebted to Eric Ries and Sarah Milstein of The Lean Startup Conference for giving me the opportunity to present. I have spoken at a good...
A little background on LSM events David Alfaro and I have had a great weekend here at Lean Startup Machine San Francisco, as part of our LeanStartupConf tour of the area. For those not aware, LSM events start on Friday night, teams form...
"Good design is no longer something that sets you apart on the web, it's the price of admission." - That's a paraphrase of a great quote I heard at the WarmGun UX conference in San Francisco. I attended WarmGun as part of my all inclusive...
How to get connected in Silicon Valley The startup world is definitely about "who you know." But more importantly, it's also about who you network with, who inspires you, and who you can help inspire or mentor. Since all of this is based...
From Flat to Vertical The world is increasingly vertical for entrepreneurs. For well over a decade, companies in North America and elsewhere have been outsourcing parts of their software development around the world in search of the cost...
Yesterday the AgilityFeat team hosted a webinar with Patrick Vlaskovits, co-author of The Entrepreneurs Guide to Customer Development and the upcoming "The Lean Entrepreneur". Patrick will be leading a workshop on customer development at...