What is the customer development process?
The customer development process is a 2 phase, 4 step customer centric framework and provides a systematic approach to validating assumptions about your product that will actually meet customer needs.
The framework was developed by Steve Blank and includes the following stages:
SEARCH
- 1. Customer discovery – Understand customers and identified the needs they have.
- 2. Customer validation – You have built a product that will satisfy your customers' needs.
EXECUTION
- 3. Customer creation – You determine whether your product will satisfy all the customers' needs by testing the correct methods for acquiring and converting customers.
- 4. Company building – You can grow your organization in order to support the demand for your product by deployed the right resources in the organization to meet the demand for the product.
The SEARCH phase of the customer development process is closely related to the Discovery step of the product management process.
