This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&#  In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the  Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities. Why is it only alarming now? MORE >>

Customer and agile development is how you search for a business model. No business plan survives first contact with the customer. Customer development = hypothesis testing, minimum feature sets and pivoting.  Product management is very different than customer development. Check out his blog. MORE >>

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. And I can even imagine cases where it might burn more cash than a traditional startup. Who’s the customer? MORE >>

That died with waterfall software development.  It should talk about how many customers you think you will acquire and how much you’ll charge for your product.  Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small? craze.  wares.  portfolios.  MORE >>

Here are a few: We know what customers want. By hiring experts, conducting lots of focus groups, and executing to a detailed plan, the company became deluded that it knew what customers wanted. But that was two full years before any customers were allowed to use it. Stealth is a customer-free zone. Focus on quality. MORE >>