{"id":15691,"date":"2017-07-13T15:39:22","date_gmt":"2017-07-13T15:39:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/?p=15691"},"modified":"2019-06-17T04:00:30","modified_gmt":"2019-06-17T04:00:30","slug":"customer-discovery-getting-out-of-the-building","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/customer-discovery-getting-out-of-the-building\/","title":{"rendered":"Customer Discovery — Getting Out of the Building"},"content":{"rendered":"

How does Customer Development model\u00a0work?\u00a0<\/strong>Customer Development is a four step framework for creating products that customers really want first outlined in Steve Blank’s book,\u00a0Four Steps to the Epiphany<\/a>. It has since become a crucial tool for startup and established companies launching new products.\u00a0Anastasia at Cleverism\u00a0gives an overview of the four steps<\/a>\u00a0— Customer Discovery, Customer Validation, Customer Creation and Company Building. The first two are a cycle of experimenting to find a problem worth solving (problem-solution fit) and a market in which to sell the product (product-market fit).\u00a0Market by Numbers\u00a0provides a handy graphic<\/a>\u00a0that summarizes the four steps. Even better, check out\u00a0this\u00a0<\/a>2 minute<\/a>\u00a0video<\/a>\u00a0that provides an excellent overview.<\/p>\n

Getting out of the building isn\u2019t enough.\u00a0<\/strong>The rallying call for Customer Development proponents is to ‘get out of the building’, i.e., to actually meet and talk to potential customers. It’s too easy for a product team to build something few people want without getting out of their bubble and eliciting real feedback. Getting out of the building involves conducting many customer\u00a0interviews which must be planned in the right way in order to get the right answers.\u00a0John Zeratsky pushes you to<\/a>, amongst other things, identify what you want to know, make sure you are talking to the right people and listen, not lead.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0<\/strong>Achilles<\/strong>\u00a0heel of customer development.\u00a0<\/strong>Conducting customer interviews can be difficult and feel unnatural for many of us. But like Ash Maurya,\u00a0there are ways of overcoming your fears<\/a>\u00a0and becoming adept at them. He suggests focusing on learning (not pitching), preparing a script, starting with people you know and recording the conversation.<\/p>\n

10 great questions Product Managers should ask customers.\u00a0<\/strong>Thankfully there are many resources available that give examples of questions that should be asked. Jim Semick lists 10 open-ended questions\u00a0including the most powerful one<\/a>\u00a0that should be asked repeatedly, ‘why?’.<\/p>\n

What I learned talking to 500 customers in 4 weeks.<\/strong>\u00a0To achieve this feat, Alex Turnbull simply emailed all of his customers and used Doodle to set up 10-15 minute calls with those who replied.\u00a0The effort paid off<\/a>\u00a0as he was able to find faults in his onboarding process, meet unhappy customers, and better understand who exactly his customers were.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How does Customer Development model\u00a0work?\u00a0Customer Development is a four step framework for creating products that customers really want first outlined in Steve Blank’s book,\u00a0Four Steps to the Epiphany. It has since become a crucial tool for startup and established companies launching new products.\u00a0Anastasia at Cleverism\u00a0gives an overview of the four steps\u00a0— Customer Discovery, Customer Validation, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15682,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nCustomer Discovery - Getting Out of the Building - Product Collective | Organizers of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/customer-discovery-getting-out-of-the-building\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Customer Discovery - Getting Out of the Building - Product Collective | Organizers of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"How does Customer Development model\u00a0work?\u00a0Customer Development is a four step framework for creating products that customers really want first outlined in Steve Blank’s book,\u00a0Four Steps to the Epiphany. 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