I’ve written a number of posts about the Lean Startup and Customer Development process. I find myself directing people to them quite often, so this page is to highlight those posts for your easy reference.
If you’re familiar with the “Bible of Lean Startups” – The Four Steps to the Epiphany, you know that the key stages of a Lean Startup are Customer Discovery and Customer Validation. I’ve organized posts into those 2 categories as well as a few good ones for beginners just getting started (note: click headings to visit posts).
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Getting Started:
Lean startup 101 - A presentation I gave at MIT
Lessons Learned in Customer Development
- A post about key pitfalls in converting a company to Lean principles and the skills you need to sharpen when performing customer development.
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Customer Discovery:
How to Structure (and get the most out of) Customer Development Interviews
- If you have any questions about how to actually conduct a customer development interview (the core of the customer discovery process), this is a post that will help you immensely. The post is loaded with example questions, a good structure to follow and key pitfalls to avoid.
I also have given this as a presentation, most recently at Lean Startup Machine San Francisco:
5 Lessons Learned in a Lean Startup
- As you start getting outside the building and learning from your customers, there are key things to keep in mind that I learned the hard way while at a startup called oneforty.
How Do You Get Back on the Customer Development Horse?
- A post about what to do when you get busy with the rest of your startup and stop getting outside the building.
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Customer Validation:
Getting to Product Market Fit
Don’t build that feature! How to use the 5 Why’s to learn what your customer really is saying
- A post about how to use the 5 Why’s method to get to the core of a customer’s request. There’s a great chance that feature they want doesn’t actually need built, but you need to ask the right questions to find out! Especially as your business is growing, this is important to avoid the dreaded feature creep.
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Managing Product:
The Lean Product Lifecycle
- So you understand the Lean Startup methodology and the concepts behind it. Great. But how do you actually feed this into building a great product? Through discussions with dozens of product managers, I came to understand the Lean Product Lifecycle that takes your product building process and makes it align perfectly with the Learn-Build-Measure loop.
If you ever have questions or need help on the nuts and bolts of lean/custdev, please reach out! I’m happy to help.
You can find me on Twitter @Evanish or Email me at evanish dot j at gmail dot com.
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