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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Silicon Valley Agile Customer Development Early Stage 239

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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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 263

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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Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 230

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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Government Technical Review Acquisition Metrics 322

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

MAY 15, 2009

The Curse of a New Building At some point in my career as I began to ponder how/why startups morph from agile, “can do&# companies to [.] [.] I think there’s a size and scale where regardless of your intentions lean and agile won’t work (looking like a grandmother in a miniskirt.) A VERY nice office.

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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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Incubator Curation Engineer Government 319

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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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 271

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. I help lead the Engineering Leadership SIG at SDForum and wonder if you would be interested in speaking to our group about lean starups. hope to hear from you.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? My answer to that was to be part of the team whose whole is better that its individual parts as its mentioned in the article, a team leadership rather that a point leadership. Expo SF (May.

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CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

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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Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 312

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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Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 145

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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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 255

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?

Silicon Valley 210

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 210

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

We might be a ways away from the reality of a Chief Engineer or Product Director role commonly in software development, but ultimately it's going to be a matter of getting the culture right so that people stick around long enough to develop not only the tactical skills, but also the honed instincts and senses. Expo SF (May.

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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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Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 201

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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Product Technical Review Engineer CTO Hire 91

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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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 222

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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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 139

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Without requiring a lot of meetings, it changes the perspective of the team (and its leadership) from fire-fighting to prevention. Thats the ultimate task for the companys technology leadership. In school I was being pounded day and night with anything that has to do with agile software development. Expo SF (May.

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Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Part-Time VPE 94

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

I want to especially recognize Vivek Wadhwa and Brad Feld for their leadership.) I want to especially recognize Vivek Wadhwa and Brad Feld for their leadership.) The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? This is a good thing. (I We have a lot of introspection to do.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

We also learned that law is code , and that leadership was needed to build thriving communities in a digital age. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? You can find the origins of many successful companies in these early lessons. Expo SF (May.

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Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

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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Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

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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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

The leadership art is to balance the needs of the present with the needs of the future. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? My career has been full of " student body right " moments, where the whole team is suddenly forced to change direction. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 76

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

Here in Tampa, our biggest challenge is convincing the regions technology "leadership" that grassroots economic development is a good thing. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? I just emailed your article to him and recommended that he take your advice to heart.

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San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

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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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 245

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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Framework Distribution Channel Leadership 401

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.

Silicon Valley 333

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 333

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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Lean Silicon Valley Government Acquisition 185

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.

Lean 185

Lean Silicon Valley Government Acquisition 185

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.

San Francisco 151

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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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