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 246

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

An example of a reversible decision could be adding a product feature, a new algorithm in the code, targeting a specific set of customers, etc. An irreversible decision is firing an employee, launching your product, a five-year lease for an expensive new building, etc. That’s why startups are agile.

Silicon Valley 302

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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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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 220

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Agile – you may find the real opportunities for your company was somewhere else. Passionate – is the company/product/customers the most important thing in your life? This means you still need to have a resilient personality, and be agile. » Dig for Leadership - Stories that try to make the world a better place. ,

Cofounder 223

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 264

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. They never understood Market Type. Why does Market Type matter? End result?

Customer Development 203

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 203

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products.

Technology 139

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 139

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 178

Lean Silicon Valley Government Acquisition 178

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 178

Lean Silicon Valley Government Acquisition 178

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

The other departments in marketing gave the same answers; the product-marketing department said their job was to write data sheets. But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. The same was true for the Product Marketing group.

Silicon Valley 263

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 263

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. Every startup has a chance to change the world, by bringing not just a new product, but an entirely new institution into existence. hey eric, love the blog.

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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? Labels: product development 15comments: mukund said. But along the way, something strange happened. How can it work if some folks are pre-building and others use five whys to drive decisions?

CTO 168

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. And the product that “talked to me&# , the loudest and most seductively, was the one that went home with me.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA « Steve Blank (tags: startup) [.] They surprised themselves with how good the final product was. Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA. You’re Hired, You’re Fired. My first job in Silicon Valley: I was hired as a lab technician at ESL to support the training department.

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

Send PDF versions of brochures and product sheets as soon as you get back to the office. Have enough dead-tree brochures and product sheets on hand before the show so you can snail-mail out the information after you emailed it. Everyone should be articulate and agile in describing and demoing the products.)

Silicon Valley 129

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

At IMVU, we were terrified by how early we shipped (and charged for) our first product. Despite that, we were able to establish credibility, because we used those early numbers to demonstrate that our customers were getting real value from our product and, more importantly, that we understood how to build more of it.

San Francisco 60

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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. This doesn't mean pointing to the product and describing the product's value, but rather the marketing provides value itself. It's a big tent.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

You have customers, they are using your product, and you are trying to help them. 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? I see startups struggle with this all the time.

San Francisco 76

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 76

Steve Blank

MAY 12, 2015

We believe NSF’s leadership with I-Corps will deliver something of equal significance… a program that teaches scientists and engineers what it takes to turn those research projects into products and services for the benefit of society. It has since been adopted by the entire federal research community.

SBIR 120

SBIR Maryland Lean Seed Stage 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

Its latest product was an oscilloscope, the HP 150a. That year HP introduced its first computer, the HP 2116A , as an instrument controller for HP’s test and measurement products. The original Hewlett Packard which made test and measurement products was spun-out and renamed Agilent. Agilent is a $5.8

Silicon Valley 169

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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.

Programming 143

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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. What would the initial minimal viable products (MVPs) – incremental and iterative solutions – look like? As the head of the U.S.

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SVPG

JULY 31, 2013

I believe in leadership. I think today that one of my most useful skills is that after 30 years of working with technology product teams, I am pretty good at spotting talent and potential. I love seeing them creating exceptional products, and leading great organizations of their own. True leaders inspire. Starting with myself.

SCRUM 60

SCRUM Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 60

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.

Vertical 123

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 123

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. And most startup code and features end up on the floor as customers never really wanted them.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2022

This 100+-year-old company has seven major product divisions, each with hundreds of products. Currently a market leader, they’re watching a new and relentless competitor with more money, more people and more advanced technology appear seemingly out of nowhere, attempting to grab customers and gain market share.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

It’s not the implementation of environmental policy for the sake of the environment, but rather that there seems to be a growing belief that environmentally-responsible and human-centric business practices lead to less waste, higher productivity, and more competitive businesses. Shipping 8 months early, with only half a product!

Silicon Valley 124

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

There’s something about working on a crappy desk that spurs better ideas and more productivity than a “professional&# desk with an ergonomic chair. 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 [.] [.] But I was wrong.

Silicon Valley 212

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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.

Agile 120

Agile Development Team Review Leadership Merger 120

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.

Venture Capital 216

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. Another piece of trivial: the road that is the side-entrance (during business hours) to Agilent Corporation HQ in Santa Clara is named “Terman Lane&# after Terman. Who would have known?

Silicon Valley 279

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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? Expo SF (May.

Silicon Valley 68

Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 18, 2009

The Thought Leadership talks are awesome. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? J oe Mathes set a great example by sponsoring a ticket to the Boulder workshop out of sheer generosity. Thanks, Joe! Hope to see you soon! 3comments: Lincoln Nguyen said. Great talk tonight.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco DC Sweden Continuous Deployment 60

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.

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Advisory Board Customer Development Leadership 335

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. Next, you have to deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers. And that’s just to get started.

Founder 302

Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 302

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 20, 2009

How about a fictive short story about few guys starting up a web product company on lean startup way? Yes, getting customers that pay cash is top priority, but if you go more into the details, I'd be really interesting about hearing what are the typical problems and what might be the first small-victories (if any). Did southwest?

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

When I try to unpack what people mean by the question, heres my best take on what they are asking: "Look, Steve Jobs doesnt go out and ask customers what they want. He doesnt put out crappy, buggy products and then ask for feedback. He tells customers what they want, and he gets it right. We stopped production for five months.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166