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

MAY 18, 2009

Next, you have to deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers. And here’s where life gets really interesting, as the reality of product development and customer input collide, the facts change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out business plan becomes irrelevant.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products. The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on?

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Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 145

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO. We’ve managed startups like this forever; there is no other way to manage them.”

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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. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers. Here’s what the product development diagram looks like from a sales perspective.

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YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

by Bill Lee, author of “ The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset “ The old paradigm works like this: Your company produces goods and services that help customers get a job done. In return, the customers pay you money. Close the sale.

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Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Market Risk vs. Invention Risk - Click to Enlarge For companies building web-based products, product development may be difficult, but with enough time and iteration engineering will eventually converge on a solution and ship a functional product - i t’s engineering, not invention.

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 167

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. As a result, the standard product development model is not only useless, it is dangerous.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 222

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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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

Home Books for Startups Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Resources Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Categories Air Force (9) Ardent (9) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (29) California Coastal Commission (3) Conservation (2) Convergent Technologies (1) Customer Development (98) Customer Development Manifesto (..)

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Also SJ's obsession with better taste (positively) contributes to the overall product development process. There are some good anecdotes about Chief Engineers in the Toyota Product Development Book. Some of these reaffirm that they do indeed validate assumptions through interaction with customers.

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YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Talented product developers. Customer content and engagement built rapid growth in the success of Intel ’s social media and Web-based marketing efforts, increasing “customer contacts” by a factor of tenfold and overall page views by 100x. If so, the business world is full of specialists who are all too eager to help.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

This product development diagram had become part of the DNA of Silicon Valley. That’s in stark contrast to the traditional Product Development Model where it’s expected a customer is already there and waiting and it’s simply a matter of [.] familiar with Customer Development you should be.

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

And other startups are in a New Market — creating a market from scratch (like Apple with the iPhone, or iPod/iTunes.) (“Market Type&# radically changes how you sell and market at each step in Customer Development. It’s one of the subtle distinctions that at times gets lost in the process.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 146

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2010

What lies ahead, however, is a different set of challenges: finding the new set of mainstream customers on the other side of the chasm and managing the sales growth curve. These new challenges require a different set of management and leadership skills. The Scalable Startup stage called for opportunistic and agile leadership.

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Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

My two cents is that a business plan is the single place to collect your thinking about about your: business model, distribution channel, demand creation plan, financial assumptions, and customer and product development plan. If you’re text averse like i am, try to diagram these key items and then write-up the diagrams.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Do they have better sales, marketing, or product development groups? What the winners start with is the realization that in a world of continuous disruption, they have only a few years to develop new capabilities or be pushed over the brink. Is it that some CEOs are better than others? Are their people smarter?

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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. They deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers. Customer Development Family/Career/Culture'

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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. Sometimes, a great hacker has the potential to grow into the CTO of a company, and in those cases all you need is an outside mentor who can work with them to develop those skills. Does this sound familiar?

Software Review 94

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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.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

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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.

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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? Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 76

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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SVPG

MARCH 17, 2011

Business and Financial Knowledge (7) - Does the product owner understand the economics and financial dynamics of his product? Process Skills: Customer Discovery Process (7) - Customer discovery includes customer interviewing skills, opportunity assessments and understanding of customer development programs.

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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 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

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

OCTOBER 1, 2009

corporation, and by extension Sloan laid the foundation for America’s economic leadership in the 20th century. Customer Development Manifesto: Market Type (part 4) + The Customer Development… (Read more)+ Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) + Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40?

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Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 184

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 28, 2009

Unintended Lessons « Steve Blank steveblank.com/2009/09/28/unintended-lessons – view page – cached + Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) + Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40?

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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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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 126

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Eighty some pages later I realized that a) I had some great war stories as a good marketeer and failed CEO, b) I’d have to pay my wife and kids to read them, c) the three of them were probably the entire total available market, and d) when I looked at what I had done and what other entrepreneurs had done at their startups, that there was a pattern.

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David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

I was fortunate to get some thoughtful input from the leadership of DarwinApps , Casual Corp , Coventure , HappyFunCorp , OAB Studies , and World Accelerator. Customer development would be reduced to a single person exercise that could be repeated in parallel dozens of times over, ultimately yielding 30+ companies a year.

Software Developers 60

Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Through trial and error, hiring and firing, successful startups all invented a parallel process to product development. In particular, the winners invent and live by a process of customer learning and discovery. It’s a process that doesn’t exist in large companies with existing customers and markets.

Silicon Valley 135

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital California 135

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. We stand on the shoulders of giants: customer development, the theory of disruptive innovation, the technology life-cycle adoption theory, and agile development.

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Lean Entrepreneur San Francisco Agile 167

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. Who’s on the Sharp End?

Silicon Valley 133

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

While both Stanford and MIT encouraged commercially oriented research and courted federal research contracts in the postwar years, MITs leadership focused on building relations with government agencies and seeking financial support from established electronics producers. What is customer development?

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Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 68