Steve Blank

I was pleasantly surprised to hear from Suresh, an ex-student I’ve known for a long time. A U.S. citizen he was now the head of sales and marketing for a company in London selling medical devices to hospitals in the UK National Health Service.  His boss had identified the U.S. as their next market and wanted him to set up a U.S. salesforce. Suresh understood that the U.S. health system was very different from the system in the UK, not just the regulatory regime through the FDA, but the reimbursement process and the entire sales process.

Over a Zoom call Suresh explained, “I’m trying to push the importance of running customer discovery and testing these hypotheses before we build our U.S. product, but I’m running into a pushback from my CEO. He says, “We’re disruptors! Discovery is going to slow us down.  We need to move quickly!”

Suresh was concerned. “If we don’t test our assumptions about the market and any changes needed to our products, we’ll build something I can’t sell. Worse, given how expensive clinical trials are in medtech, I’m concerned if we build a product that isn’t commercially viable, we’ll be out of business before we even start.”

I could hear his frustration and concern when he asked, “How can I convince my boss to use customer discovery to test our hypotheses?”

That’s when I realized that Suresh was overlooking a few things.

1. He was trying to sell the “story” of Customer Discovery as part of the Lean Methodology to his CEO by explaining how discovery worked with the business model canvas, agile engineering, pivots and MVPs.
2. But talking about the method to others is not the same as “doing” Customer Discovery.
3. Customer Discovery is about gathering validated evidence, not proselytizing a method.
4. The goal of discovery is to gather evidence to test hypotheses, deeply understand the customer problem and validate a solution.
5. As head of sales and marketing, Suresh didn’t need his CEO to buy into the process or give his permission to start the discovery process. He was in charge.
6. Given the ubiquity of Zoom, he could use it to rapidly get out of the building to the U.S. to test some hypotheses and gather some initial insights.

I pointed out that once he had potential customer, regulator, and reimbursement data from his Discovery interviews, he could bring that data into conversations with his CEO.

Having real data turns conversations from faith-based to evidence-based.

Lessons Learned

• Talking about the Lean method to others is not the same as doing it
• If you’re in charge or part of a customer-facing organization, you don’t need to wait for permission to talk to customers to test hypotheses
• Having real data turns conversations from faith-based to evidence-based

Filed under: Customer Development |