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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

The first hint lies in its name; this is a product development model, not a marketing model, not a sales hiring model, not a customer acquisition model, not even a financing model (and we’ll also find that in most cases it’s even a poor model to use to develop a product.) release of the product.

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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. I hope this thinking already sounds inane to you. What plan says that?

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Touching the Hot Stove – Experiential versus Theoretical Learning.

Steve Blank

In 1978 when I joined my first company , information about how to start companies simply didn’t exist. Since I wasn’t an engineer, my contribution was around the team-building and fund raising. It’s what my textbook on Customer Development describes. I’m going to go do that Customer Development stuff after we raise money.”

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Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners.

Steve Blank

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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Vertical Markets 4: Putting it All Together « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

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.

Vertical 122
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Story Behind “The Secret History” Part III: The Most Important.

Steve Blank

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. The Army offered Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, a $5M contract to build an electronics countermeasures lab. HP had an ethical culture, entrepreneurial spirit, and deep Stanford engineering department connections.

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He's Only in Field Service

Steve Blank

As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. Your board nods sagely at your target customer list. I cover this in the Four Steps to the Epiphany.)