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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

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. Each starts inventing and testing their own alternatives about how to sell and position the product.

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The Product Development Model « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

This product development diagram had become part of the DNA of Silicon Valley. That’s in stark contrast to the traditional Product Development Model where it’s expected a customer is already there and waiting and it’s simply a matter of [.] familiar with Customer Development you should be.

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Let's Fire Our Customers

Steve Blank

Pattern Recognition One of the great things about being an entrepreneur is that you are constantly running a pattern recognition algorithm against a continual collection of customer and market data. However, if the founder is still running the company, the last thing he wants is a company complacent with day-to-day execution.

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

Steve Blank

They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products. I knew everything about our operating system, hardware and applications – and I was going to prove it.

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Vertical Markets 2: Customer/Market Risk versus Invention Risk.

Steve Blank

The line is just a first approximation, nothing hard and fast about it.) Invention Risk - Click to Enlarge For companies building web-based products, product development may be difficult, but with enough time and iteration engineering will eventually converge on a solution and ship a functional product - i t’s engineering, not invention.

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Out of the Ashes - Something Isn't Quite Right

Steve Blank

At about the same time, two newer companies asked me to join their boards. Surprisingly, I enjoyed seeing other startups from an outsider’s perspective. To everyone’s delight (and my surprise,) I usually could quickly see what needed to be fixed. No longer personally involved, I became a dispassionate observer. To Order Outside of the U.S.