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Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy
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Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy
by Cindy Alvarez
Lean Customer Development
Praise for Lean Customer Development
Foreword
Preface
Who Is This Book For?
Who Can Practice Customer Development?
How Does This Book Fit into O’Reilly’s Lean Series?
Why I Wrote This Book
What You’ll Learn
A Word of Thanks
1. Why You Need Customer Development
The First Challenge Is Inside the Building
What Is Customer Development?
What Is Lean Customer Development?
What Customer Development Is Not
Customer Development Is Not Just for Startups
Customer Development Is Not Product Development
Customer Development Does Not Replace Product Management
Customer Development Is Not User Research
Why You Need Customer Development
How Do We Improve Our Odds?
Answering Common Objections
Let’s Make This Work
Next Step: Get Started
2. Where Should I Start?
Exercise 1: Identify Your Assumptions
Ready? Set? Go!
Exercise 2: Write Your Problem Hypothesis
Exercise 3: Map Your Target Customer Profile
Next Step: Find Your Target Customers
3. Who Should I Be Talking To?
How Can I Find Customers Before I’ve Even Built a Product?
Come On—Why Would They Talk to Me?
The Importance of Earlyvangelists
Three Things That Motivate People
Helping Others Makes Us Happy
We Like to Sound Smart
Fixing Things Gives Us a Sense of Purpose
Come with me on a trip to the DMV
How Can I Find My Customers?
Ask Your Connections for Introductions
Would you introduce me to your friends who ...?
Casting a Wider Net
Finding people on LinkedIn
Finding people on Quora
Finding people on forums and private online communities
Finding people in the offline world
Using blog posts
Using Twitter
Not using Craigslist
Using a landing page
How Should I Conduct My Interviews?
Visiting the Customer’s Home or Office
In-Person Conversations in a Neutral Location
Phone Conversations
Video Chat or Call with Screen Sharing
Instant Messaging
Following Up
Scheduling Phone Interviews
Scheduling Face-to-Face Interviews
Spacing Your Interviews
Interview Troubleshooting
What If No One Responds?
Interview No-Shows
Next Step: Get Ready for Customer Development Interviews
4. What Should I Be Learning?
Get Started with These Customer Development Questions
Customers Don’t Know What They Want!
What You Should Be Listening For
What’s the Customer Already Doing?
Abstract up one level
Focus on procedure, not outcomes
Focus on the present, not the future
What Constraints Are Holding Customers Back?
Problem is not perceived as a problem
Lack of awareness of what’s technologically possible
Limited resources
Cultural or social expectations that limit behaviors
What Frustrates (or Motivates) Your Customer?
How Your Customers Make Decisions, Spend Money, and Determine Value
Next Step: Get Ready to Do Your Customer Development Interviews
5. Get Out of the Building
The Practice Interview
To Record or Not to Record?
Taking Great Notes
Invite a Note-taker
Immediately Before the Interview
The First Minute
The Next Minute
Keeping the Conversation Flowing
Avoiding Leading Questions
Digging a Little Deeper
Tangents Happen
Avoiding the Wish List
Away from Features—Back to the Problem
The Magic Wand Question
Avoiding Product Specifics
Going Long
The Last Few Minutes
After the Interview
Get Out (Now!)
6. What Does a Validated Hypothesis Look Like?
Maintaining a Healthy Skepticism
Are They Telling You What You Want to Hear?
Is the Customer Saying Something Real or Aspirational?
Keeping Organized Notes
Keeping Your Notes in One File
Creating a Summary
Rallying the Team Around New Information
How Many Interviews Do You Need?
After Two Interviews: Are You Learning What You Need to Learn?
Components of a validated hypothesis
What each interview should tell you
Within Five Interviews: The First Really Excited Person
Within 10 Interviews: Patterns Emerge
Challenging the patterns
No patterns yet?
How Many Interviews Are Enough?
Experience with customer development and industry
Complexity of business model and number of dependencies
Investment required to create your MVP
After Enough Interviews You Stop Hearing Things That Surprise You
What Does a Validated Hypothesis Look Like?
Now What?
7. What Kind of Minimum Viable Product Should I Build?
What Should My MVP Do for Me?
MVP Types
Pre-Order MVP
Case Study: Finale Fireworks
Use Cases
Audience Building MVP
Use Cases
Concierge MVP
Case Study: StyleSeat
The initial hypothesis
Starting on the MVP
Expanding the hypothesis
Ongoing customer development
Use Cases
Wizard of Oz MVP
Case Study: Porch.com
Hypothesis invalidated
Minimum exceptional product
Use Cases
Single Use Case MVP
Case Study: Hotwire
Map-based search results on a shadow site
Iterating on the MVP
Revising the MVP to solve pain points
The new site gains traction
Use Cases
Other People’s Product MVP
Case Study: Bing Offers
Roadblocks lead to pivot
An opportunity to make deals easy for customers
Keep learning from customers
Use Cases
We’ve Built an MVP, Now What?
8. How Does Customer Development Work When You Already Have Customers?
Adapting the MVP Concept
Nothing Broken
Attractive but Fake
Use a sketch
Use a different domain
More Viable than Minimum
It’s different for startups
You know someone cares
A little beyond minimum: user complaints, but not frustration
Watch out for those who can’t stop at minimum
Finding the Right Customers
How I Learned to Find the Right Customers by Finding the Wrong Ones
Find the People Who Can’t Live Without Your Product
Customers Say the Magic Words
How Customers Lower Your Market Risk
Once You’ve Found Your Customers, Explain, Explain, Explain
You’re Asking Questions—Not Building Something
Say It Again: This Is Exploratory
The Storytelling Demo
Incognito Customer Development
Taking on a New Identity
Talking to People Who Aren’t Customers
Show Me How You’re Using Our Product
Here’s How to Use Our Product
It Can Work For You, Too
9. Ongoing Customer Development
Who’s Already Out of the Building?
Who Can It Be, Knocking at Your Door?
Feature Requests
Functionality or Design Issues
Bugs and Errors
Question of the Week
Recognizing Bias
Closing the Loop
Collecting Information
Sharing the Impact of Customer Development
Now You’re Ready
A. Questions That Work
Questions for Any Customer Development Interview
Tell me about the last time you ___
If you could wave a magic wand and change anything about how you [perform this task], what would it be?
What tools do you use for _____?
When you started using [tool], what benefit were you expecting?
The whole problem may not be solved
How often do you do _______? Let’s say, how many times in the past month?
When this occurs, how much additional time or money does it cost you or your company?
Helping them quantify
Who else experiences this problem?
When you do (or use) ______, is there anything you do immediately before to prepare?
Online bill pay is surprisingly manual
Would you be willing to help us by participating in user research or beta testing?
How asking this question helps with future product development
Questions for an Existing Product
When you use [our product], what’s the first thing you do with it?
What’s the most useful thing that you regularly do with our product?
If you had [requested feature] today, how would that make your life better?
Other customers have told me that they experience [problem]...
If It Works, Keep Asking It
Index
About the Author
Copyright
Search in book...
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Praise for Lean Customer Development
Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy
Cindy Alvarez
Beijing • Boston • Farnham • Sebastopol • Tokyo
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