« Will App Delivery Paa… | Home | 7 ways a Platform can… »

18 lessons learned during the 6 year roller-coaster ride called Mendix

Last week I gave a talk about the lessons learned during the exponential growth of our company the last six years. I was invited to to talk at the Appsterdam meetup in Delft about "growing pains". In other words: what lessons did we learn when our company grew from 3 to 100 employees. I enjoyed the preparations as much as the actual talk, as it forced me to step back and think about the things we did and did not last years.

I covered lessons learned in four categories: company, culture, product development, and product evolution. Attempting to cover all these subject automatically means that you stay at a high level. However, I think I was able to share some valuable experiences from the trenches. It will be interesting to dive deeper in the separate categories in the future!

The slides:

Do you recognize these lessons? What are your most important lessons learned? If you have questions, don't hesitate to ask them in the comments!

Tweet

4 comments

Thanks, sorry I could not be at the talk, should meet !

Rudi van Drunen (URL) - 14 04 12 - 20:58

Hi Johan,

Very nice to see mendix evolving in the past years. As a member of the mendix community I really noticed that involving the community into the development is one of the best things Mendix did. I have two questions for you:

1: What would you do radically different if you could turn back the time? So in other words: what is the best lesson you’ve learned.
2: What is your next aim or goal with Mendix?

Samet Kaya (URL) - 08 05 12 - 22:32

Hi Samet,

1. The lessons learned in the slides in this post are based on the things we learned over time both due to success and due to mistakes. What would I do radically different? I would need to write the before situation, what we changed, and what we learned to show what we changed over time. I only did the last part in this post. I will write a future post which will be more oriented on the full perspective.

2. Well… can’t say much about that here. What I can say: we will stay focused on continuous improvement in all aspects of the business.

Johan den Haan () (URL) - 23 05 12 - 08:25

citation
1. The lessons learned in the slides in this post are based on the things we learned over time both due to success and due to mistakes. What would I do radically different? I would need to write the before situation, what we changed, and what we learned to show what we changed over time. I only did the last part in this post. I will write a future post which will be more oriented on the full perspective.
citation

I’m very interested in your experiences in the past and what we can learn from you. So I will watch your future posts.

Samet Kaya (URL) - 23 05 12 - 11:40