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Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way.

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Lessons Learned: Work in small batches

Startup Lessons Learned

Take the example of a design team prepping mock-ups for their development team. Give the dev team your very first sketches and let them get started. And over time, the development team may be able to start anticipating your needs. That frees up even more development resources, and so on.

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Lessons Learned: The product manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

I met one recently that is working on a really innovative product, and the stories I heard from their development team made me want to cringe. The product manager was clearly struggling to get results from the rest of the team. Labels: product development 8comments: Vincent van Wylick said.

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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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Datablindness

Startup Lessons Learned

You constantly assess the situation, looking for hazards and timing your movements carefully to get across safely. So the product development team was busy creating lots of split-tests for lots of hypotheses. Each day, the analytics team would share a report with them that had the details of how each test was doing.

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Lessons Learned: Product development leverage

Startup Lessons Learned

The idea of leverage is simple: for every ounce of effort your product development team puts into your product, find ways to magnify that effort by getting many other people to invest along with you. For example, I recently created a customer validation exercise around the Lean Startup Workshop. Its a key lean startup concept.

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Lessons Learned: The engineering manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

Most of the other processs changes - mandatory design reviews (prelimninary, critical, etc), - documenting all our procedures, and so on - were to support those two factors. A project usually has an absolute duration and budget whereas the time and money dedicated to development within the project is where the tradeoffs are made.