A good friend had been working for a startup company for about 6 months. He had been very excited about it initially. It involved robots, artificial intelligence, and some large scale computing problems. It was right up his alley. We’d gone out celebrating when he’d got the job, and he’d gushed about how cutting edge their technology was.

When will the team be ready to ship?” There is probably no question we engineers hate more than that one. For as long as I have been building software, bumping up against 20 years now, I have observed engineers, engineering teams, and engineering managers squirming in their conference room chairs, frantically waving their hands, and saying just about any words they can think of — words like “dependencies” and “technical debt” and “build process” — to avoid directly answering that question.

“We’re unhappy with the engineers we’ve hired to build the product. That’s why we’re calling you guys. We want you to fix it.” This was a frequent request back when I led a software consulting agency. Every week or so, from 2000 to 2011, I got a call or an email from someone whose company was facing imminent financial disaster unless they could salvage their failing software project.

We all have been making apps and putting them on the App Store for almost 10 years now. But if you look at the data, only a small number of apps are actually being used. Furthermore, these apps have pretty much all been made by the big technology players, like Google and Facebook. And yet, year after year, startups continue to build mobile apps that would be lucky to get a few thousand downloads.

Marc Andreessen famously quipped that “software is eating the world”. He was referring to the increasing reliance on technology, in nearly every industry, not just software companies.

The rise of SaaS, cloud and big data, AI and machine learning, and the ubiquity of mobile devices with easy access to high-speed Internet represent both a threat and an opportunity to traditional companies, particularly those established before the Internet revolution of the last few decades. These companies now find an imperative to either “act like a software company,” or be crushed by their competitors.

The name of the game in any startup venture is to find product-market fit as quickly as possible; and if you don’t hit it first time, to find an idea that works before you run out of money. Agile software development and Lean Startup methods both help you do it (ideally, used together). But while there is a lot written about the principles of Lean and Agile, there are precious few step-by-step guides on how to actually execute.