Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.
I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better.
Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build - the thing customers want and will pay for - as quickly as possible.
Bill Gates is a very rich man today... and do you want to know why? The answer is one word: versions.
You can polish and iterate and double down on what the magic was. You can make a much better thing. A much cleaner thing, a much more solid thing. And that's what 'Borderlands 2' is to 'Borderlands.'
The lean startup method is not about cost, it is about speed.
Everything for me starts very small and snowballs. So I rarely start with the grand idea and find a place for it and narrow down. It's, really, just start small, and as I'm writing it, I begin to see - sometimes to my own surprise - what's unfolding and what's blooming.
'Humans of New York' did not result from a flash on inspiration. It grew from five years of experimenting, tinkering, and messing up.
Prototyping is the conversation you have with your ideas.
In the case of 'Fish,' I did the writing, design, and code all at the same time, so the form and the content were fused together. I'd change some words, get an idea, change some code, see if it worked, change more words, and so on.
The Lean Startup isn't just about how to create a more successful entrepreneurial business, it's about what we can learn from those businesses to improve virtually everything we do. I imagine Lean Startup principles applied to government programs, to healthcare, and to solving the world's great problems. It's ultimately an answer to the question: How can we learn more quickly what works, and discard what doesn't?
I can't usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it's new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it's about function.
Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.
The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.
We built 'Jade Empire,' then we built 'Mass Effect,' then we built 'Dragon Age.' With those last two, when you're dealing with two big ideas that are on their third iterations, you develop some strategies for managing your lore, or you drown!
You can't start a product simply by building it. You have to know why you're building it, and you might go down the wrong rabbit hole, waste time, and confuse things. Spending long afternoons with a sketchbook or talking through your ideas with other people can save a year in software development later on.
I think a lot of great software has been written by people who are scratching a short-term itch, something which has been niggling them for ages, but in the back of their mind they’ve got a wonderful long-term plan.
Don't be afraid to stumble. Any inventor will tell you that you don't follow a plan far before you strike a snag. If, out of 100 ideas you get one that works, it's enough.
Responsible Development shares many practices with XP but the roots are different. Responsible Development's values are honesty, transparency, accountability and responsibility. These lead me to pairing, test-first, incremental design, continuous integration and so on because they support the values.
Essentials of how to do a startup do not include writing a business plan
Decades before we were able to articulate the value of 'getting out of the building' and the Lean Startup, the value in having skunk works controlling their own distribution was starkly evident.
Our job as the game creators or developers - the programmers, artists, and whatnot - is that we have to kind of put ourselves in the user's shoes. We try to see what they're seeing, and then make it, and support what we think they might think.
I'll drop something for a while, a year or maybe several years, and then pick it up again. I think that's the way successful innovators work. They keep juggling ideas, keeping them in the air, in the back of their mind, to inspire them or enable new recombinations.
Oftentimes the shows that don't work help you get it right.
Prototype, then polish. Get it working before you optimize it
