1) Lean Startup (in Russian)

Short Summary of the book Lean Startup by russian venture capitalist Arcadiy Moreynis (in Russian). The book itself is highly recommended.

Another short summary by Jane Smorodnikova

2) How to evaluate and implement startup ideas using Hypothesis Driven Development by Daniel Tenner

Another article with a list of questions you should ask yourself first when projecting a new idea.

2.1) How to get startup (and feature) ideas

An article by Paul Graham of Y Combinator on how to set your mind to coming up with successful startup ideas. Describes the “correct” way of thinking for coming up with such ideas.

3) The customer development methodology

A short summary of the Customer Development methodology by Steve Blank.

Self-check questions:

What are the two major hypothesis on your startup idea you should check first?

What is MVP? What is it for? What types and examples of MVP do you know of?

What is Customer Development?

Imagine a team of two developers, a designer and a product manager. How would you build processes in the team so as to minimize the time of the build-measure-learn iteration?

4) How to Get Out of the Building with the Validation Board

Read the basic text and all the required links.

Self-check questions:

The best excercise would be to try to pitch some idea to the target audience.

5) A Five-Step Process For Conducting User Research

A structured framework for conducting a research for any product purpose. And another one:

Michael Margolis — Questions To Ask Before Starting User Research

Self-check questions:

What is research? What is it for?

How to get prepared for the UX testing?

Imagine you have a 10-pages transcript from the UX interview. What to do next?

What research methods do you know about?

6) Design Better And Faster With Rapid Prototyping

A good overview of the prototyping topic.

7) Some examples of the approaches to prototyping

What are the best tools for rapidly prototyping a web-application? (from Quora)

Creating Interactive Prototypes With Keynote (from Keynotopia)

Kyle Gray, Kyle Gabler, Shalin Shodhan, Matt Kucic — How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days

Self-check questions:

What is rapid prototyping? What is it for? How can it be implemented in the build-measure-learn cycle?

The best task would be to create any kind of prototype for your idea and conduct a user interview with it.

8) Interviewing Humans

Some expert thoughts of Erika Hall on interviewing people.