A Quote by Steve Blank

Using the Product Development Waterfall diagram for Customer Development activities is like using a clock to tell the temperature. They both measure something, but not the thing you wanted.

Steve Blank

Quote Topics

Activities Both Clock Customer Development Diagram Like Measure Product Product Development Something Tell Temperature Thing Using Wanted Waterfall

Quote Author

Steve Blank
American - Businessman
Born: 1953

All the businesses from the beginning of history have struggled with product development (assuming there is a market, doing the market testing and so on). But now they start with customer development. Get the customer who says, "Yes. I want that. I need it. I wanna use it. I'll pay for it." And then you go back and work with your engineers. It is changing the world!

Brian Tracy

Success is a continuing thing. It is growth and development. It is achieving one thing and using that as a stepping stone to achieve something else.

John C. Maxwell

For Customer Development to succeed, everyone on the team - from investor or parent company to engineers, marketers and founders - needs to understand and agree that the Customer Development process is different to its core.

Steve Blank

Traditional sales and marketing involves increasing market shares, which means selling as much of your product as you can to as many customers as possible. One-to-one marketing involves driving for a share of customer, which means ensuring that each individual customer who buys your product buys more product, buys only your brand, and is happy using your product instead of another to solve his problem. The true, current value of any one customer is a function of the customer's future purchases, across all the product lines, brands, and services offered by you.

Seth Godin

The best customers for us are the ones that present us with a new problem because chances are, if one customer has that problem, 100 more have it, or 1,000, or 10,000. So you start thinking about solution development rather than product development.

Michael Dell

Setting customer expectations at a level that is aligned with consistently deliverable levels of customer service requires that your whole staff, from product development to marketing, works in harmony with your brand image.

Richard Branson

Market type determines the startup's customer feedback and acquisition activities and spending. It changes customer needs, adoption rates, product features, and positioning as well as its launch strategies, channels and activities.

Steve Blank

Boston must take every opportunity to move toward transparent, accountable, equitable development for public health and shared prosperity. That starts with using our votes and our voices to fight for a development approvals process that serves our communities.

Michelle Wu

Balance is so important. We all have to cut up our clock to find out what works for you. If you're ineffective, you're using bad clock management, and you have to adjust. Using a basketball reference, the team who wins is the team that can make adjustments in real time.

Kim Fields

The most common way customer financing is done is you sell the customer on the product before you've built it or before you've finished it. The customer puts up the money to build the product or finish the product and becomes your first customer. Usually the customer simply wants the product and nothing more.

Fred Wilson

The thing that I often ask startups on top of Ethereum is, 'Can you please tell me why using the Ethereum blockchain is better than using Excel?' And if they can come up with a good answer, that's when you know you've got something really interesting.

Vitalik Buterin

When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done

John Maynard Keynes

Greatest risk is not development of new product, but development of customers and markets

Steve Blank

The governments and the communist parties in Vietnam and China are doing their best to develop their local economies. But the rise of countries in Asia is not in opposition to development and affluence in Western nations. It is a mutually beneficial development. The interests of Western investors are protected in our country. Both we and the West benefit from this in equal measure.