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.
