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Why Build, Measure, Learn – isn’t just throwing things against the wall to see if they work

Steve Blank

Best practices in software development started to move to agile development in the early 2000’s. This methodology improved on waterfall by building software iteratively and involving the customer. With Agile you could end up satisfying every feature a customer asked for and still go out of business.

Lean 120
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A New Way to Teach Entrepreneurship – The Lean LaunchPad at Stanford: Class 1

Steve Blank

It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. The first class was an introduction to the concepts of business model design and customer development. This post is part one.

Lean 300
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The Class That Changed the Way Entrepreneurship is Taught

Steve Blank

A decade later, I began to teach the foundations of Lean, first at UC Berkeley (Customer Development) and then at Stanford using cases and business plans. Lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering). Let’s Teach Lean Via Experiential Learning. experiential.

Lean 435
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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. Finally, I’ll write about 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.

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Lean Meets Wicked Problems

Steve Blank

In this case Wicked doesn’t mean morally evil, but refers to really complex problems, ones with multiple moving parts, where the solution isn’t obvious. This post previously appeared in Poets & Quants. I just spent a month and a half at Imperial College London co-teaching a “Wicked” Entrepreneurship class.

Lean 294
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“Lessons Learned” – A New Type of Venture Capital Pitch

Steve Blank

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.

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How to Find a Market? Use Jobs-To-Be-Done as the Front End of Customer Discovery

Steve Blank

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

Customer 421