Lean Customer Development

Praise for Lean Customer Development

“Cindy has done us a great service. Lean Customer Development shines the light on the discipline of developing a clear understanding of the customer. By understanding who the customer is, what their real needs are and developing clear hypotheses; product, design, and engineering can design, build, and test what customers really want. This frees teams to focus on the business of bringing the best experiences to life instead of a product nobody wants. Whether you are a startup or a large enterprise you need to develop this discipline and this way of thinking about the customer. I recommend this book.”

—Bill Scott—Senior Director UIE, PayPal

“Cindy drives home the case for maintaining a continuous dialog with our customers. This book is chock full of actionable steps to make the most out of every conversation, user test, and feedback session. She opens up the research process encouraging teams to build a shared understanding of their users’ needs and the validity of their hypotheses. Make sure you add this terrific step-by-step guide to your arsenal of product development tools.”

—Jeff Gothelf—Author, Lean UX

“Companies are learning that the only competitive advantage is the ability to make continuous learning and iteration part of their culture. For many large organizations, including Microsoft, this means re-learning how to engage with customers as partners. Lean Customer Development offers a view of how companies of any size can practice deep customer learning in parallel with product development.”

—Adam Pisoni—Corporate Vice President, Microsoft

“This is a daunting book. It’s so packed with concrete steps, hard facts, and proven techniques that it removes any excuses you might have around building the right product for the right market. When I finished it, the first thing I wanted to do was go read it again. The second thing was to get out of the building and test five startup ideas. It’s that good.”

—Alistair Croll—Founder, Solve for Interesting

“Understanding what your customers need and will buy is easier said than done when your customers are Fortune 100 companies. Lean Customer Development is full of practical, hands-on guidance that allows our entrepreneurs to immediately ‘get out of the building’ and validate (or invalidate) their market and assumptions.”

—Ravi Belani—Managing Director, Alchemist Accelerator; Fenwick & West Lecturer of Entrepreneurship, Stanford University