Quick product development – for early stage startups

  1. Automate your CI/CD pipeline. Saves a lot of time on manual work and allows your team to release multiple times a day.
  2. Use a monorepo. That will keep things simple, organised and transparent within your startup.
  3. Break all features into small, incremental changes. That enables early feedback and reduces the chances of a big failure.
    • product team should break work into 1-2 days tasks
    • engineering team should push their changes daily
  4. Use feature flags.
    • engineering team won’t have fear to deploy
    • you can roll out features to a beta group of users
    • you can gather feedback from your team and external users faster
    • you can run a/b tests and perform experiments
  5. Define product and engineer owners for every feature.
    • to avoid shared responsibility and delivery delays
    • to encourage personal responsibility and unlock all talents of your team
  6. Request at least one demo per week. Motivate your team to share their work early, so you can discover bugs and provide feedback before too much time spent.
    • prototype → preview → beta → production — these are four demos you should ask your team to record for every feature
    • every feature team should record 1-2 demos every week
  7. Deploy weekly and follow simple CI/CD process.
    • use single branch (develop) for all development, deploy to test environment on every commit
    • merge develop branch into main once a week to deploy to production
  8. Freeze the code before release.
    • helps your QA team to test changes and ensure quality before production release.
  9. Don’t write many tests if you’re early stage startup.
    • tests are great in the long run, but can slow you down in the short run.