Week 6 Sprint and Customer Development

This week, we finished the five days process on ‘Sprint’ and start talking about customer development.

After understanding the process of sprint, I find it really fast and effective for any type of business. For our startup team, we can definitely benefit from it. We always need to do our work effectively in a startup team because time is valuable and we need to resolve the problem as soon as possible. I really like the concept about time in this five day process. It increases a team’s efficiency on working. Also, we can benefit from making prototypes and testing our ideas. These steps can help us better understanding our products and identify the products’ capability in the market.

A company’s success is not only based on their product development but also their customer development. A startup team should find the right customers in the market and produce the products which satisfied their need. There are four steps in customer developments which are customer discovery, customer validation, customer creation and company building. As professor emphasized in class, most startup teams can not pass through the first two steps of the customer development process. That’s because of the pivot that every startup team needs to find the right customers in the market and keep testing them. A good pivot process can secure the future of their product. It makes sure that their products can be consumed and liked by the customer. The difference between customer development and product development is obvious. One is targeting customers in the market and the other one is producing the products for the customer. However, most of the companies failed by focusing too much on product development instead of customer development. They need to target their customers first.

“ Get out of the office” is important for our startup team to testify our ideas and find customers in the market. Our startup idea is about helping students to go to college by using rap music. However, as I mentioned in the last post, we are still confusing about the correlation between helping students to college and rap. It’s gonna be really cool if rap really work among the students. In this case, “Get out of the office” can help us to understand our customers. The majorities of our customers are high school students. We can do investigations on them by visiting some local high school during weekend or holidays. Also, we may invite some high school students to visit CWRU and get to know their thoughts and interest through our conversations. Furthermore, we can use the interview skills we learned from ‘Sprint’ to do some interviews on high school students to generate datas. After all the steps we go through, we shall organize all the datas we collected to make a conclusion about our investigation. During the group meeting, we shall figure out a new way to do our activity. We will also find whether the customers like our ideas or not. In the end, we can have a bigger picture to locate our business in the market.