Sixth blog post: Customer Development Model

Even though our team hasn’t start the Sprint process yet but I think it is absolutely something my team could benefit from. The process is clear and simple yet provides us a fast pace in developing our business model. We have to try it soon with the right tools a (pos-its, whiteboards, colorful markers).

The major difference between traditional product development and customer development should be the ‘pivot’ point or the check point which makes sure that our model is really going to work before we move on to execution part which consists of customer creation and company building. The pivot point in customer discovery and validation phases is an agile process which is iterative. In customer discovery process, we are ‘stating a hypothesis’ which is thinking who our customers might be and what kind of people they are. After that we have to validate that those kinds of customers do exist. If not then you have to go back to customer discovery phase and try to find new customer niche. If our customer model does not work, then we do not have to carry on the execution part, thus we are likely to waste less time than using traditional process which has no pivot process involved.

By “getting out of office” means you are going to experience the customer’s problems in the real world. This is very important because if we do not exposed ourselves to what is happening outside the building, we would often assume things and neglect the real problem that is happening. Thus the customer validation process is extremely important since we have to confirm that those kind of customers we are looking for really exist.