September 2017
Beginner
240 pages
6h 11m
English
Content preview from Lean Customer DevelopmentBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 1. Why You Need Customer Development
It is humbling to see how bad experts are at estimating the value of features (us included). Despite our best efforts and pruning of ideas, most fail to show value when evaluated in controlled experiments.
The literature is filled with reports that success rates of ideas in the software industry are below 50%. Our experience at Microsoft is no different: only about a third of ideas improve the metrics they were designed to improve.
—Ronny Kohavi, Partner Architect at Microsoft
Nature hath given man one tongue but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.
—Epictetus
Customers are what make a product successful.
Without customers willing to buy, it doesn’t matter how good or innovative or beautiful or reasonably priced a product is: it will fail.
It makes no sense, then, that we spend most of our time and effort optimizing our product development process. What about customer development? Shouldn’t we invest at least as much time in understanding our customers, their needs and pain points, and how to deliver solutions to them?
Customer development is an approach for doing just that.
It’s a way to reduce your business risks by challenging your assumptions about who your customers are, what they need, and why and how they buy.
By applying the scientific method to learning about your customers, you can help confirm that you’re on track to a business model that works and a product that people want to buy.
Sounds great in theory, ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.