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5 Tips to Becoming a More Customer Centric Organization

Both Sides of the Table

Our sales guys were on the front line and heard what they needed to win deals. He decided that our largest customers would be involved in the setting of our priority lists (we did some of this internally in the early years but we saw it mostly as a sales process). The Outside In organization had a one-way flow.

Customer 280
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The Lean LaunchPad – Teaching Entrepreneurship as a Management Science

Steve Blank

There are few courses which teach aspiring entrepreneurs the skills (business models, customer and agile development, design thinking, etc.) We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. Start your blog/wiki/journal. Update your blog/wiki/journal.

Wiki 311
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Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

Startup Lessons Learned

This theory has become so influential that I have called it one of the three pillars of the lean startup - every bit as important as the changes in technology or the advent of agile development. Mark Leslie has articulated a very similar methodology to "4 steps to the epiphany" in his "sales learning curve" model which I also find compelling.

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Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Startup Lessons Learned

For a startup, having great sales DNA is a wonderful asset. This is the magic of sales: by learning about each customer in-depth, they can convince each of them that this product would solve serious problems. But here’s where a truly great sales artist comes in. Go on an agile diet quickly. They are closing orders.

Customer 167
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Andrew Chen: Growing renewable audiences

Startup Lessons Learned

In an enterprise sales context, this is called a "repeatable and scalable sales process" - once you know how to do this, your company can graduate from early adopters and make an attempt at the mainstream. Lean Startup Wiki - including a complete list of local meetups and meetup organizers. Expo SF (May. Bring your questions.

Audience 119
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Lessons Learned: The four kinds of work, and how to get them done.

Startup Lessons Learned

Now its time to start to think seriously about how to find a repeatable and scalable sales process, how to position and market the product, and how to build a product development team that can turn an early product into a Whole Product. Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campa.

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Lessons Learned: The engineering manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

When I first encountered agile software techniques, in the form of extreme programming , I thought I had found the answer. I explained it to people this way: agile lets you make the trade-offs visible to whole company, so that they can make informed choices. Even worse, agile wasnt really helping me ship higher quality software.