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!

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  1. Rudi van Drunen April 14, 2012 | Reply

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

  2. Samet Kaya May 8, 2012 | Reply

    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?

  3. Johan den Haan May 23, 2012 | Reply

    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.

  4. Samet Kaya May 23, 2012 | Reply

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

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