Lean Customer Development

Preface

We have guesses about what’s good for the user, but we’re mostly wrong. No matter how good you are, you’re mostly wrong.

—Adam Pisoni, CTO of Yammer

In a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.

—Steve Blank

In 2008, at the startup I was working for, my manager dropped Steve Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany on my desk. “You have to read this book,” he said. “It’s brilliant and we need to learn from it.”

Blank wrote about the failures (and successes) he’d experienced in two decades and eight technology companies. Through his experiences, he recognized a process that was missing from startups, which he called “customer development.” In reading his book, I recognized both mistakes that I’d made and mistakes I’d observed in companies around me. We were not verifying that we were building something customers would buy. Too often we substituted our internal industry and product knowledge for customer input.

I also recognized some of the techniques in the book. I had already been using them in my career—not because I’m as smart as Steve Blank, but out of necessity as a user experience professional working in companies with a lot of uncertainty, no budget, and no dedicated team.

It was with The Four Steps in my head that I walked into my first meeting with one of our early customers. It was an easy meeting; they liked us and nodded in approval as my manager talked about our upcoming product release. As the hour drew to a close, people around the table made the universal ...