
"We don't really practice agile development nor CD" - Mint.com - ebloch
http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-circle/msg/05f54a9ec9e3bc45?hl=en
======
far33d
"2) Market. We're in an existing market where the pain is pretty acute and the
problem domain well defined. Additionally, the incumbent competitors had
basically neglected the market as unattractive."

Cust. Dev. is not as important when competing in an existing market, as
opposed to building a new market - there's less uncertainty about the needs of
customers.

~~~
wensing
Unless you're re-segmenting the existing market.

~~~
alttab
This comment is undervalued, a lot of times people don't necessarily know what
"if I just get 1% of the market" really means because they haven't gathered
any data

------
skoob
I hate showing my ignorance, but what is "CD"?

~~~
ebloch
Customer development :)

~~~
fizx
I think it could also be continuous deployment.

~~~
teej
The author is a product person, and he specifically mentions "The Four Steps
to the Epiphany" so I believe he's talking about Customer Development.

~~~
fnid
One of the previous items in the thread also mentions customer development:

 _Useful, sure, but for those of use way before those steps, there was nothing
about customer development._

[http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-
circle/tree/brow...](http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-
circle/tree/browse_frm/thread/e472671840994845/7969b1f9cbe33404?hl=en%05f54a9ec9e3bc45&rnum=1&_done=%2Fgroup%2Flean-
startup-
circle%2Fbrowse_frm%2Fthread%2Fe472671840994845%2F7969b1f9cbe33404%3Fhl%3Den%2505f54a9ec9e3bc45%26tvc%3D1%26#doc_40cc1006da279f83)

------
credo
imo if they do major "waterfall" releases every two months, they are probably
doing it right and getting most of the benefits of "agile" development

Unfortunately, "agile" has become religion for a lot of people and sometimes,
it is also an excuse for poor planning. Similarly the "waterfall" approach is
sometimes used as an excuse for not making any decisions.

Ultimately, what matters is basic good development principles. "Agile"
development has a lot of good practices and the so-called "waterfall" approach
also has its benefits and the right approach is to use the most appropriate
methods for the team. Getting hung up in terminology isn't going to help

~~~
DanielBMarkham
If they're making stuff people want in small timeboxes, they're being agile.

Agreed that agile has become too religious.

Now having said that, I'd argue that smaller timeboxes with a tighter feedback
loop into "what people want" would make them even more successful.

The neat thing about real agile isn't that it's a religion (although it is for
many) it's that it gives us context to talk about what works better or worse
in iterative, incremental development.

------
Confusion
_We tend to follow a more traditional (waterfall) dev cycle, with patch
releases roughly every 1-2 weeks and major releases every 2 months._

If you release every two weeks, with a define-design-develop-deploy cycle in
those weeks, then you may very well be doing agile development. In my current
project we're employing Scrum (but I really don't think that matters; might as
well name it Lean, Kanban, XP, RUP or whatever) and we're doing just that.
It's working pretty darn well, I may add, primarily because of the near-
continuous customer feedback.

~~~
dasil003
It certainly doesn't sound like that's what he means. I expect "patch
releases" means bug fixes and small tweaks.

In any case, the guy said they don't do agile. I am really loathe to try to go
in and discover a way in which it could be interpreted as agile after the fact
lest it feed into the whole consulting/book-selling/conference-
organizing/koolaid circus that agile has already become.

~~~
plinkplonk
"In any case, the guy said they don't do agile. I am really loathe to try to
go in and discover a way in which it could be interpreted as agile after the
fact"

Amen!

Classifing any project with a practice passing resemblance to _some_ "agile"
practice as an "agile project " just leads to the twinned "all successful
projects were _really_ doing agile whether they knew it or not" and the "any
failed agile project didn't do "proper" agile, even if they said they were"
fallacies.

This is especially weird since "agile" really didn't invent anything (except
maybe rigid TDD). It just packaged some "best practices" into one label. Short
iterations was a known to be effective practice well before the advent of
agile.

------
abyssknight
The most successful start ups and products I've ever had the pleasure of
building or working on were complete and utter nightmares as far as modern
development methodology is concerned. Heck, I remember when we wrote MyBlogLog
we didn't even have source control. The key is to get the product to market as
fast as you can. You can fix your process later, you know, when you have more
than one employee.

~~~
kylemathews
I'm not so sure about that. Speaking as a one-man startup who has moved
recently from pre-modern to modern development methodology, using modern
techniques like continuous deployment and dvcs (git) pay off pretty quick.
Having a one-command deployment, for example, it's a huge time/stress saver
when makin bug fixes or small feature changes several times a day.

~~~
abyssknight
Oh we had 1 click deployment too. It was FTP. :) That said, Capistrano is an
easy way to make deployment much easier/fun/dangerous. I wish we'd had SCM and
a deployment tool back in the day, but back then we just... didn't. Instead we
had to focus on getting it right the first time, because there was no going
back.

On my side projects I use cap+deprec+svn, so I completely understand the
appeal. My point is that you don't have to use a bunch of tools, have tests,
and/or use modern methods to be successful. Sure, it makes the journey easier,
but its certainly no requirement for having a great product.

------
rokhayakebe
Customer Development is probably best for Enterprise level applications where
you can speak with the head of a 100-person team and get an answer for
everyone else.

For consumer applications, however, you can ask 1000 inidviduals and get a
"No" while your product could still be helpful to 4 million others. For
example when I ask my friends to switch from Yahoo Mail to Gmail they usually
answer "What does Gmail do that Yahoo doesn't?" or "This is fine for me".

EDIT: What if Twitter followed a customer development model? They probably
would not have written a single line of code.

~~~
trapper
"For consumer applications, however, you can ask 1000 inidviduals and get a
"No" while your product could still be helpful to 4 million others."

You are asking the wrong people then. CD just saved you a huge amount of
heartache, by not trying to market to the wrong segment.

~~~
rokhayakebe
Le's say you are twitter founder pre-1st-line-of-code, who do you ask?

~~~
trapper
Whoever you have identified as fitting your hypothesis on early adopters. It's
not rocket science.

~~~
KC8ZKF
So you ask the people who are most likely to give you the answer you want to
hear.

~~~
trapper
That's the point. What are you missing?

If the people you think you are going to market to don't think your product
idea is good, then you have nothing.

------
mahmud
Am I the only one here who doesn't want to take software-engineering advice
from a UI company? When it comes to engineering, I want to hear from Yodlee
and what they're doing to solve problems.

------
sonofjanoh
What's agility after all?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agility>

For me being agile is adapting to a changing environment. Animals are being
agile to survive in their natural environment and we are agile to survive in
our environment. If your "agile" mind tells you to slow down to get to
something you do that. So if "waterfall" is the key for the next few releases
then what's the problem? The "agile law" would have to draw up all the
scenarios in the world to be word for word otherwise what agile means is: do
whatever you want just get it done and I can share you this and that from my
experience. It is basically passing on responsibility and judgment to the
executioner after a bit of coaching ideally from past experiences. Think of a
coach-football player relationship. This is how I see it and I hate this
branding of it and of putting labels everywhere when it should be: "stop being
an idiot and take it from there" - common sense

------
edw519
Well written and informative but dangerously close to corporatese...

Mintspeak: _We've hired a bunch of great product folks and engineers, and all
of them are Mint users, so we're typically "scratching our own itch"._

What we really mean: Don't need no stinkin' market research.

Mintspeak: _We're in an existing market where the pain is pretty acute and the
problem domain well defined. Additionally, the incumbent competitors had
basically neglected the market as unattractive._

What we really mean: We kicked ass.

Mintspeak: _...unlike most start-ups, we're dealing with people's financial
information._

What we really mean: We run a serious business and you don't.

Mintspeak: _...we have a number of quality control and security processes that
rival most financial institutions, and which would would be difficult to
incorporate into an agile dev cycle._

What we really mean: Our secret sauce has nothing to do with the trend du
jour.

Mintspeak: _...a big part of Mint's success was being in the personal finance
space when the economy melted down._

What we really mean: We're good, but we're lucky too.

~~~
joe_the_user
Mintspeak: We're in an existing market where the pain is pretty acute and the
problem domain well defined. Additionally, the incumbent competitors had
basically neglected the market as unattractive. _What we really mean: We
kicked ass._ No, it has says, we only had to do reasonably well because
competition wasn't putting in many resources to the problem.

Sorry but what they say is clear and only slightly corporate but what you
"translate" it to is less meaningful statements in snide "dudespeak".

------
eagleal
It seems to me that their plan was to build the product and than sell it, to
someone big, to integrate with something else. It's like they don't care a lot
about adding new features or things like that, like they don't care about
modern or old techniques. Just build it.

~~~
wensing
I think their main features were 'it's easy to use and pretty and it works
well'. They cared a lot about those.

------
weaksauce
Continuous Deployment

That being said I think the smartest people generally don't care about asking
a question when they don't know something. Cue feynmann.

Edit: oops meant to reply to someone here. iPhone failed me.

------
reefboy
"neither do we give a shit if we put our product up in a state that is pretty
much unusable".

