Here’s a great book about the Customer Development Process, a term offered to us by Steve Blank. It’s a bit of an oldie at this point, but these days I hear everyone in entrepreneurship classes are reading it, and for good reason.
The content is a bit repetitive and could have used some serious editing, but I really like the concepts and systematic approach to building a market for your products from the ground up (as opposed to building a product for a “potential” market). The reality is, both efforts should go hand in hand.
Personally, my biggest beef with the book is that it makes it seem like if you check off a few boxes and jump through a set of hoops that you WILL end up with a successful product. In my experience, that just isn’t true. I’m sure Steve Blank would also agree because he’s a smart guy and caveats everything he writes effectively. But I still get a sense that people will read this book as some kind of magic formula for guaranteed success in startups, and I don’t think it is. I’ve used many of these techniques over the years and still failed.
The fact is, I always enjoy when engineers think they have “cracked the code” for delivering successful products with some kind of newfangled process or product design model. In my experience, there is no secret process that will solve all our problems. That is, there’s still quite a bit of magic pixie dust required for success that is found in the right timing, the right people, the right opportunities, the right connections, and being in the right place at the right moment that no amount of boxes, arrows and process charts will every replace.
But if the stars are aligned, then Steve Blank’s approach offers light upon light. So I recommend it highly.
Enjoy.
