The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution (part 1)

Four Steps to the Epiphany is the Prequel to “the Fifth Epiphany”

Steve Blank

This post makes more sense if you read the previous post – The Leading Cause of Startup Death: The Product Development Diagram.

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development.

Every startup has some methodology for product development, launch and life-cycle management. At their best, these processes provide detailed plans, checkpoints and milestones for every step in getting a product out the door: sizing markets, estimating sales, developing marketing requirements documents, prioritizing product features.  Yet at the end of the day even with all these processes 9 out of 10 of new products are failures.

So what’s wrong the product development model? The first hint lies in its name; this is…

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