What every technical and non-technical founder needs to know about running an agile technical team. Agile Development teams focus on continuous value (to the business) delivery not continuous progress to a fixed feature set. As a result, traditional cost accounting, cost control, and budgeting will not work. …

Project houses and freelance agencies like Upwork can be brutally efficient at standing up a well-specified MVP. When you simply don’t have the cash or can’t see a way to get it anytime soon, this approach is often your only hope. This is also a viable approach when you imagine…

D.Labs has “startup” (eg. MVP) type initial engagements and “scale-up” initial engagements. This latter scale type initial engagement can have two forms: Where we replace the existing team, or Where we work in synchronization with the existing technical team. The following applies to special considerations when applying to that “type…

Engineering Services as a Technical co-founder Partner We provide dedicated and shared resource teams that provide far more than just engineering and coding. We act more like a co-founder and not just do the execution but also help you set the priorities to get to the market sooner and cheaper. …

Engineers love to use terms like “Feature Driven Development” vs “Date Driven Development” to indicate the priority when scope exceeds deadlines. An engineering manager in a former company once told a customer: “Cost, quality, deadlines,… You can say they are all important, but what you are really telling me is…

When is Agile Software Development Worse? Existing products used by known customer groups are usually best developed with conventional waterfall methodology (ie. like you would build a house). I would also argue that anything that has already been sold to a customer should be developed with conventional Waterfall. In both of these cases, the end point…

My old friend Matjaž Slak from Cofound.it stopped by to discuss with a new client about their ICO (Initial Coin Offering) readiness. For those you living under a rock, ICOs have been red hot in 2017 as an alternative funding strategy for startups. Matjaž reports that over summer, the almost…

Our CEO, Jaka, is now publishing proper peer-reviewed articles … The benefits and implementation of performance transparency: The why and how of letting your customers ‘see through’ your business Authors: Omar Merlo, Andreas Eisingerich, Seigyoung Auh, and Jaka Levstek Abstract: While some organizations swear by the benefits of transparency and are eager to learn and implement transparency practices, many managers are still reluctant or even afraid to use them. Our…

Founders come to D.Labs with an idea that will change a market. They sometimes have strong funding in place, but they almost always have two key missing ingredients: An actual product (technology) and actual customers. Building technology is what D.Labs is about. Acquiring users and building a user acquisition strategy…