Customer Development: prototyping with words

Customer development is a methodology for testing ideas and hypotheses early to prevent wasted time and effort. It was created by the creator of the lean startup movement Steve Blank.

In an earlier article we showed the various types of prototypes and how they cover the ideation space. Early prototypes need to be cheap as they are designed to cover large ground and are likely to fail and need refinement.

There Are No Facts Inside Your Building, So Get Outside — Steve Blank

In his book The Four Steps to the Epiphany Steve outlines a method of writing down all the assumptions you have that need to work for a new innovation to be successful, including the people who need to sign off, the cost structure etc. He then instructs you to go out into the wild and talk to people and test these hypotheses.

If you learn that the person who will ultimately buy the product needs sign-off from another department, and they wont sign off unless the product is packaged in a certain way, you have saved the time and effort of actually making the product and learning this the hard way.

This method is essentially prototyping with words, going into the market and presenting ideas with words alone to uncover value. This does not remove the need for other prototyping tools as people are not very good at telling you what they need/want but it allows you to remove a lot of valueless search space at very little cost early on in a project.