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.

Silicon Valley 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 25, 2014

It wasn’t always perfect, but it was way more right than wrong, It informed our product development to a great degree and kept us working on more or less the right stuff. Hired the Smartest People. The old adage “A players hire A players, and B players hire C players ” applies here.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

Now the company is in crisis mode because the rest of the organization (product development, marketing, etc.) Why it’s not a crisis is that the Customer Development process says, “do not staff and hire like you are executing. The half-life of the first VP of sales of a startup is ~18 months.).

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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. Market Type also affects the market size as well as how you launch the product into the market.

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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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Steve Blank

JANUARY 10, 2011

The VP of an operating division had run into trouble in product development; the product was late and getting later. The revenue plan had the new product baked into the numbers and it was clear that this division General Manager was going to crater his forecast (happens all the time, nothing new here.) Lie to My Face.

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

.&# Most startups tend to think they are selling into an Existing market – a market exists and your company has a faster and better product. If that’s you, by all means hire a VP of Sales with a great rolodex and call on established mainstream companies – and ignore the rest of this post.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

In hindsight it appeared clear that startups that survive the first few tough years do not follow the traditional product-centric launch model espoused by product managers or the venture capital community. Through trial and error, hiring and firing, successful startups all invented a parallel process to product development.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2022

To succeed they realized this isn’t simply coming up with one new product. The company had hired a leading management consulting firm that helped them select 15 critical areas of change the Tsunami Initiative was tasked to work on. It meant pivoting an entire company – and its culture.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

The key contributors to an out-of-control burn rate is 1) hiring a sales force too early, 2) turning on the demand creation activities too early, 3) developing something other than the minimum feature set for first customer ship.

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Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

If any of the answers are “Yes,” then hire them a bit later as an early employee. They deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers. The two tests of whether someone belongs on a founding team are: “Do we have a company without them?” and, “Can we find someone else just like them?”

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

He spoke at the Founder Institute last week, and his advice was to not hire a PR agency until there were so many inbound requests that you can’t handle them yourself. Page views drive his ad revenue, which is probably CPM based. He knows how to publish articles that drive page views, and this is a good one.

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Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 184

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

Every marketing communication hire couldn’t wait to produce the next great ad or PR program. Every product marketer thought they should help define the product feature set, etc. In an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be product development and customer development.

Silicon Valley 126

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 26, 2020

He also said, “The most important hire I made in my time at the JAIC was the chief technology officer, Nand Mulchandani.” Nand changed the culture of the JAIC, bringing in Silicon Valley tools for product development, product management and for the first time a culture that focused on UI/UX, MVPs and continuous integration and deployment.

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Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

The second thing that’s changed is that we’re now Compressing the Product Development Cycle. In the 20 th century startups I was part of, the time to build a first product release was measured in years as we turned out the founder’s vision of what customers wanted. That’s no longer the case. We now understand that’s wrong.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

Compressing the Product Development Cycle. In the past, the time to build a first product release was measured in months or even years as startups executed the founder’s vision of what customers wanted. Startups traditionally required millions of dollars of funding just to get their first product to customers.

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