Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy

How do you develop products that people will actually use and buy? This practical guide shows you how to validate product and company ideas through customer development research—before you waste months and millions on a product or service that no one needs or wants.

With a combination of open-ended interviewing and fast and flexible research techniques, you’ll learn how your prospective customers behave, the problems they need to solve, and what frustrates and delights them. These insights may shake your assumptions, but they’ll help you reach the “ah-ha!” moments that inspire truly great products.

• Validate or invalidate your hypothesis by talking to the right people
• Learn how to conduct successful customer interviews play-by-play
• Detect a customer’s behaviors, pain points, and constraints
• Turn interview insights into Minimum Viable Products to validate what customers will use and buy
• Adapt customer development strategies for large companies, conservative industries, and existing products

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Why You Need Customer Development
Chapter 2: Where Should I Start?
Chapter 3: Who Should I Be Talking To?
Chapter 4: What Should I Be Learning?
Chapter 5: Get Out of the Building
Chapter 6: What Does a Validated Hypothesis Look Like?
Chapter 7: What Kind of Minimum Viable Product Should I Build?
Chapter 8: How Does Customer Development Work When You Already Have Customers?
Chapter 9: Ongoing Customer Development

Appendix: Questions That Work