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Video of this presentation from the
April 23, 2010 Startup Lessons Learned
conference is available at
http://bit.ly/bBpUcm
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But Does it Scale?The Evolution of Lean at IMVU
Brett G. Durrett, James Birchler, Timothy Fitz
IMVU, Inc.
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Introduction
• Assumption audience is quite familiar with
Lessons Learned blog
• IMVU sometimes referred to as the
original Lean Startup
• Talking about how we now work and the
learning that lead us here
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Quick Background
• Customer Development & Lean principles lead company to tremendous growth
• Fast development – everybody focused on getting new things into customers hands
• No “golden gut” - customer metrics beat grand product vision
• Inspirational environment – everybody empowered to make product decisions
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Success!
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Scaling Our Success
• Product Owners for R&D, productizing,
monetizing and keeping things running
– Smaller, independent versions of company
• Same successful philosophy and practices
– Ship fast (but 2 month cycles feel slow)
– Anybody can make product decisions
– Customer-facing over infrastructure
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Not So Much
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Not So Much
• Revenue dropped even though we were
the using exact same philosophy and
practices that delivered success
• Product becoming “bucket of bolts”
– Features abandoned because development
teams disbanded / moved to new projects
• Emphasis on customer-facing changes
leads to increased technical debt
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Scaling This Success: Plan B
• 7 “customer experience” product groups
– acquisition, discovery, connection, etc.
• Persistent feature ownership
• Each group has key business metric
– Conversion, retention, # chats, etc.
– Combined metrics ultimately drive revenue
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Again, Not So Much
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IMVU Revenue by Quarter (in millions)
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Again, Not So Much
• Revenue flat
• Product still a “bucket of bolts”
• Technical debt continues to pile up
– Build infrastructure hindering development
– Can’t iterate on IM client
• Lack of progress leading to morale issues
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Key Failures
• Didn’t align everybody for success
– Competing metrics = adversarial owners
– Authority disconnected from responsibility
• 7 product teams = too small to be effective
– No desire to apply limited team to tech debt
• Focus on immediate customer feedback
prevented “big bet” improvements
– Bias favors features over infrastructure
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Scaling This Success: Plan C
• Align organization for success
• Strengthen product ownership
– Support it with effective project management
• Allow “big bets”, not just optimizations
• Don’t lose the things that make us great!
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Getting Aligned
• Officers determine business strategy
– Shared (repeatedly) with all employees
• All employees have same incentive plan
– 2009 targets for profitability and revenue
• Authority consistent with responsibility
– Drive accountability
– Required difficult changes to culture
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Stronger Product Ownership
• VP Product clear mandate
– Determines long-term product strategy
– Aligns product owners to company strategy
• Three product teams: product,
monetization, keeping things running
• Product Owners determine all product
changes
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Project Management
• Needed visibility into:
– Where we spend development resources
– Better ROI assessment when planning (the “I”)
– What others are doing (transparency)
• Resource Allocation
– Product decides % of resources to each area
– Engineering determines actual people
• Variation of scrum, 2-3 week sprints
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Scrum at IMVU – How it Works
• Product Owner, QA, Tech Lead pre-plan
• Full team reviews detailed project planning
• 3 engineers agree on task duration
• Template tasks for all projects, esp. “Technical Review of Code Once Shipped”, which leads to work added to “Engineering Project Follow-up” lane
• Engineers hand off code to Product Owner/QA with a feature demonstration
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Seeing the Big Picture
• Passion for customer validation great
• Obsession for immediate validation can
distract you
• Easy to lose sight of:
– Product opportunities requiring a big bet
– Increasing technical debt
– Infrastructure needs
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Customer vs. Infrastructure
• Customer facing features prioritized over
infrastructure critical to early success
• When it compromises ability to rapidly
iterate a key strength is lost
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How Do You Know?
“We are hiring smart people that can’t make
changes to our code”
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Payback of Technical Debt
• Dedicated technical investment projects
• Some systems get a technical debt “tax”
applied only when product changes
• Tech Leads can add project requirement
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Build Infrastructure Overhead
• Effective development systems require
ongoing investment to scale
– Impacts speed and morale
• IMVU spending 20% of engineering on
maintenance of the tests and process
– Even with premium we find it has high ROI
• Pain follows a square wave pattern as we
scale the organization
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Example: New IM Client
• Not previously possible
– 1-year design and development
– Substantial non-customer-facing infrastructure
• Big win for customers and technical debt
– Solved key issue confusing customers
– Rate of development greatly accelerated
• Iterated with customer validation!
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Example: Hack Week
• Originally few requirements– Anybody can develop anything
– Have to demo it at end of week (live)
• New requirements – anything, but ship it or kill it– Each person allowed 1 project at a time
– Product adopts it, keep building it or kill it
– Limit customer exposure until adoption
– Engineers need business data to make decisions!
• Results– Much higher rate of projects getting to customers
– Many engineers choose to work on existing product plan!
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Key Cultural Values We Kept
• Customer metrics validate our decisions
• Value everybody’s ability to contribute to
product direction
– Great ideas can come from anywhere
• Culture of accepting failures so long as
you learn (and improve)
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But Does it Scale? (Yes)
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IMVU Revenue by Quarter (in millions)
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Oh Yeah…
Interested in getting more experience?
We’re hiring!
http://www.imvu.com/jobs/