Customer Development | Glossary

 

Definition

Customer Development is a framework that consists of four steps, namely:

  • Customer discovery – Understanding customer needs and your ability to satisfy them
  • Customer validation – Building the right product that satisfies the customer needs
  • Company creation – Determining your product’s ability to satisfy  the customers needs
  • Company building – Growing your organization in order to support the demand for the product

The framework provides a method of application that validates postulations about your product and/or business and understand working with ‘User needs’. This is widely applied in the ‘Lean Startup’ approach.

 

Further Reading

  • “Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers”(book), by Cindy Alvarez.
  • For more on Customer Development, read here.