Remove Agile Remove Product Development Remove Sales Remove Silicon Valley
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Why The Government is Isn’t a Bigger Version of a Startup

Steve Blank

Some of the best and brightest wanted to work for defense contractors or corporate research and development labs. Indeed, Silicon Valley was born as a center for weapon systems development and its software and silicon helped end the Cold War. Some of the speed is simply due to development methodologies.

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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. So what’s wrong the product development model?

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The Customer Development Manifesto: The Startup Death Spiral (part.

Steve Blank

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.

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Blowing up the Business Plan at U.C. Berkeley Haas Business School

Steve Blank

Starting in the 1950’s, Stanford’s engineering department became “outward facing” and developed a culture of spinouts and active faculty support and participation in the first wave of Silicon Valley startups. At the same time Berkeley was also developing Cold War weapons systems. See the presentation here.).

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Convergent Technologies: War Story 1 – Selling with Sports Scores.

Steve Blank

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.

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Startups Lessons: Product First

Venture Chronicles

3) It all starts with the product: Companies can overcome a great many challenges with band-aids, duct tape, and bailing wire. but one aspect of a startup and/or growth stage company that cannot be glossed over is the product. It all starts with the product. We should have been able to do both.

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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. In contrast, sales and marketing activities before first customer ship are adhoc, fuzzy, and don’t have measurable, concrete objectives. Freemium models have their own scorekeeping.)