Oh, by the way, the Apple team used the lean customer development process to create what became 'Apple Mac' in 1984 after several other business ideas failed.

What is lean customer development, though?

Lean customer development involves various tools and strategies that work together to help you build something quickly with minimum resources.

Some famous examples of lean customer development are PayPal, Dropbox, and even the original Apple team.

While it has roots in software development, the lean methodology can be used for any product or service.

The more traditional approach to building something is called waterfall development (think all legacy product development).

This model has extended time frames and huge budgets spent on planning before anything tangible happens.

But that is a separate discussion.

The idea behind lean customer development is to create prototypes early and get feedback from customers sooner than later so you can pivot your business strategy if necessary instead of spending more money on something that may not work out at all.

There are four steps in the lean customer development process:

*Empathize

*Define

*Build

*Pivot or persevere

The following summarizes those four steps and variations that can 
be used with lean customer development.

1. Empathize: Learn as much as you can about customers.

Objective: Identify a problem worth solving and the potential customer need.

Strategy: Do as much research as possible about your customers (buyer personas), the problem, and related opportunities.

2. Define: Create the simplest thing that could work.

Objective: Identify and build a solution.

Strategy: Start with customer interviews and use lean startup tools such as minimum viable products (MVP), customer development interviews, and co-creation to identify customers' wants.

3. Build: Gather feedback from customers

Objective: Build a great product that people want to use and buy, and take to market.

Strategy: Use your customer development process, lean startup tools such as MVP tests, and learning from social media marketing to gather feedback from customers about what they think of the solution you built.

4. Pivot or persevere: Make decisions and course correct.

Objective: Decide whether to keep going with the current business model or make a pivot (change direction).

Strategy: Use customer feedback from product usage, surveys, social media comments, and interviews to decide if your business should stay on its current course or pivot to another direction.

Lean customer development has helped teams build unique products while limiting risk and failure.

In future articles, we'll delve deeper into lean product concepts.

In the Comments section, you'll find a link to the Lean Customer Development book.

#leanthinking #productdiscovery #customerinteraction #leanstartup #mvpdevelopment #customer