Steve Blank

MARCH 2, 2011

In it Shackleton defined courage and leadership. Working with him, I’ve been impressed to watch his small team embrace Customer Development (and Business Model Generation ) and search the world for the right product/market fit. This would be one of the most heroic journeys of exploration ever undertaken. So why this post?

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Agile – you may find the real opportunities for your company was somewhere else. However, you will be dealing with almost daily change, (new customer feedback/insights from a Customer Development process and technical roadblocks ,) as the company searches for a repeatable and scalable business model. carry on reading.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 15, 2019

These processes reduce risk to an overall organization, but each layer of process reduces the ability to be agile and lean and – most importantly – responsive to new opportunities and threats. Process helps ensure that you can deliver solutions that scale without breaking other parts of the organization. Process Versus Product.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

After these slides, these VC’s recognized that this company had dramatically reduced risk and built a startup that was agile, resilient and customer-centric. The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. Your “Customer Development Process&# has really resonated for me.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. his next article on SuperMac, “Building the Killer Team – Mission, Intent, and Values&# , Steve further pounds the table on some principles of leadership that I think are [.]

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

It didn’t help that “innovation” was the new hot-button buzzword from senior leadership, and incubators were sprouting in every division of their company, it just made their job more unmanageable. — Fast forward a year, and slowly, like turning a supertanker, the innovation pipeline we proposed is taking shape. Lessons Learned.

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

We agreed that all her founding CEOs seemed to have the same set of personality traits – tenacious, passionate, relentless, resilient, agile, and comfortable operating in chaos. I coach agile teams for a living, and I do most of my work with start-ups. I said, “well for me you’d have to add coming from a dysfunctional family.”

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on? Customer Development and Selling Strategy If you’ve just started your company you are in customer discovery. Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2010

To get to this Transition stage, the company needed passionate visionaries who can articulate a compelling vision, agile enough to learn and discover in real time, resilient enough to deal with countless failures, and responsive enough to capitalize on what they learned in order to secure early customers. Lessons Learned.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

And in hindsight, we seemed a bit more agile and innovative in WWII.) Yet decades later the military lacked the agility to write a spec in two years, let alone get 10′s of thousands of new systems deployed on aircraft as Terman had done. How was this possible?

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. In 1962 Wheelon left for a new job as the first director of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology where he was responsible for development of OXCART , the A-12 Spyplane, and three major satellite reconnaissance systems.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. Finally, I’ll write about how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

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SVPG

OCTOBER 14, 2014

” We were big practitioners of what we now call Customer Development, and our customer was typically the IT organization of large companies. I remember being immediately struck by how different we designed and built technology, versus how our customers did. 10) Leadership. 6) Process.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

These tools—Customer Development, Agile Engineering, and Business Model design—became the lean start-up methodology , a rigorous approach to testing hypotheses and building prototypes, and, on the basis of data and evidence, adjusting or pivoting to a variant of the original hypothesis. Scaling is the crux of ambidexterity.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. While that’s not true, it is a fact that entrepreneurs only have one word for “startup.” .

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

Everyone should be articulate and agile in describing and demoing the products.) For bigger booths a good rule of thumb is to have two to four staffers for every 100 square feet of exhibit space. Even for the smallest trade show, no one shows up without booth training. Messages, themes, demo’s. What didn’t?

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customer development that the founder needs to understand. Initially your job is to understand each of the parts of your business model before you hire someone to do it.

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Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

Even if they become part of the founding team, it’s not a given that the founder, having come up with the idea has a “guaranteed” leadership role (CEO or VP) in the new company. Key attributes of an entrepreneur on a founding team are passion, determination, resilience, tenacity, agility and curiosity.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

And how thinking of a solution to this commonly used model’s failures led to a new model – the Customer Development Model – that offers a new way to approach startup activities outside the building. Product Development Diagram 1. —– Part 2 of the Customer Development Manifesto to follow.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2022

This meeting was a biannual gathering of all the leadership involved in the corporate-wide initiatives to out-innovate their new disruptors. It was a testament to John and Avika’s leadership that even off duty people were passionately debating how to solve these problems. It was an amazing display of organizational esprit de corps.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

You don’t get grades for having resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity. From the king of customer development, Steve Blank: [.] There’s a big difference between being an employee at a great technology company and having the guts to start one. You just get successful.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2016

The good news for the country is that the leadership of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has decided to turn the ship now. The process starts by collecting agency-wide ideas and/or customer problems, collecting a group insight, and sorts which problems are important enough to pursue.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2016

The good news for the country is that the leadership of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has decided to turn the ship now. The process starts by collecting agency-wide ideas and/or customer problems, collecting a group insight, and sorts which problems are important enough to pursue.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

The original Hewlett Packard which made test and measurement products was spun-out and renamed Agilent. Agilent is a $5.8 Technology changes, culture changes, customer needs change, more agile competitors emerge, etc. AKPC_IDS += "376,"; (No Ratings Yet) Loading … Posted in Leadership | Tagged Amp, [.]

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Steve Blank

APRIL 26, 2010

It was an all day event devoted to the theory and practice of Lean Startups and Customer Development. It wasn’t until Eric Ries sat in my class and had the insight – that to actually implement Customer Development engineers needed to couple it with an agile methodology – that the theory turned into practice.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

PayPal, under the leadership of David Marcus and Bill Scott, re-defining and re-engineering itself by embracing Lean Startup to improve the product experience. Struggling to explain the successes and failures of those companies, I discussed principles like continuous deployment, customer development, and a hyper-accelerated form of agile.

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www.women2.org

MARCH 8, 2012

After quitting my job and starting Sorced , I spent a few months validating my business concept by creating the product mockups and doing customer development. We launched the Global Womens Journey series last year to discuss womens path to leadership. The Alchemist Series: Customer Development and Metrics.

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Steve Blank

JULY 1, 2009

Filed under: Secret History of Silicon Valley « Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA Rocket Science 2: Drinking the Kool-Aid » 2 Responses Ben , on July 1, 2009 at 2:31 pm Said: Great post Steve. I can’t get this one out of my head. during World War II.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 6, 2009

Air Force also needed improvements in frequency agility to protect its cold war bombers. Frequency agility can be best described by what happened over Germany in WWII. B-47 - primary Strategic Air Command Bomber in the 1950's As a result, to protect its bombers flying over the Soviet Union the U.S.

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

In an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be product development and customer development. Later on in this same company’s life, sales will become the pointy end and product development moves to a supporting role. No one was confused after that.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

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Steve Blank

MAY 13, 2009

Reply Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA « Steve Blank , on June 29, 2009 at 7:02 am Said: [.] Reply Gravity Will Be Turned Off « Avid Editor’s Insights , on May 17, 2009 at 1:31 am Said: [.] entire story can be found at Steve Blank. It’s worth a few minutes time off from reaming [.]

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 10, 2009

Rapid Scan/High Probability of Intercept – Stanford’s contribution In the last post we described Stanford’s high power, electronically tuned microwave tubes (the Backward Wave Oscillator ) which made high power, frequency agile airborne jammers possible.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

Sure the rest of the stories diverge though… can’t really imagine a Soviet counterpart to the Customer Development method. Reply Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA « Steve Blank , on June 29, 2009 at 7:02 am Said: [.] Reply Ben C. , The invention of electronic warfare, part I and II. [.]

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

I teach teams various Agile techniques, and occasionally get told some particular trick is cheating. E.g., we take a big spec, cut the 80% that, for some core group of customers, is nice rather than necessary, and ship the 20% ASAP. Just remember ethics and values are about what you practice when the going gets tough.

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