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Comment on Ask HN: CTO to-do list for new software product startup

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Frankly, those are terrible checklists. The first has things like "adapt a style guide", "Decide on comments or no comments in code" and "Admin user". The second one has things like "Implement a performance evaluation and career development system," and proposes you do these things iteratively over 90 days.

If you're the head of a new startup, you're lucky if you have more than one person writing code after 90 days.

The most practical checklist I've seen is Steve Blank and Bob Dorf's The Startup Owner's Manual. It's still not very practical, but it highlights very important things like landing sales, getting product market fit, and common mistakes. A lot of these other checklists will have you spend all your time doing busywork but at the end of your 90 days, you'll have your organization charts but still won't make a cent.

Startup Owner's Manual is great. However I'm looking for a much more technical to-do list... i.e., here is the best practice for dev-ops, here is the best practice for security, here is the best practice for data lakes, etc. Understandably these will vary greatly org to org, and are bound to be biased, yet having a collection of these lists will help myself and others distill what is needed for a specific org.

I think on the technical end, if you're serious about writing a valid checklist, it will probably be as easy to write code that does it. And those end up as frameworks, even if it's as simple as https://html5boilerplate.com/

There's a lot of noise out there because of all the consultants trying to do marketing. And while some, like Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names [1] are actually helpful, the line between what should be acted on and what should be ignored isn't clear.

[1] https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers...

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