Synchronising the Process of Development
Summary
Customer development is important and needs to be your focus from day one, but if you can synchronise this with your product development you’re on the road to start-up success.
Synchronising The Process Of Development
If you’re thinking customer development is now your only focus and this is going to be the answer to creating and initialising your start-up’s perceived success, you’re wrong. Just because you employ customer development from the beginning doesn’t mean you can ignore product development. Your product is as important as the customers. Without customers there’s no point in developing the product and without the product there’s no point in finding customers. It is the case that customers need to be a bigger focus for your start-up than you might have previously thought, but that product that you have such a passion for is still what drives you. If you can synchronise these two areas and bring them together, you stand a higher chance of succeeding in your start-up.
Bring it all together
Your customer development and your product development need to be happening side by side. Yes, in those early days it is vital to find your customers and to know they exist and will want your product, but you also need to have a product to offer them. You need a customer development team out there talking to customers and listening to them, and you need a product development team internally working on product orientated activities. Above all, you need these two teams to talk to each other and work together. There must be a meeting of minds. A start-up doesn’t have defined customers at the beginning, but it has a product. As customer development takes place and questions are asked, product development must respond to those questions and refine the product based on what the customers want. During the customer discovery process it’s important that product development also listen to the customers and understand what they want before continuing to develop the product. In customer validation product development must present the product to customers as part of the presales process. And during the company building step product development should help train the service and support staff.
The process and shared goals
Building a successful start-up is a bit like walking in fog. You can’t see the path in front of you clearly enough at first and much work has to be done before the mist rises and you have a clear blue sky. The four steps of customer discovery, customer validation, customer creation and company building need to be done with a shared focus across customer development and product development. The shared goal is to prove that this is a viable and profitable business that can succeed and to do that you need customers and a saleable product those customers will buy. If you follow the four steps of customer development with product developmentfully integrated into the system you are creating, you can move forward with a common goal and easily understandable objectives. If you do this you can give your investors proof and move your company into the moneymaking arena.