Lean in Berlin

What is customer discovery? - Source from The lean startup

The customer development model focuses on understanding customer problems and needs.

Customer development is the process of discovering problems experienced by potential customers and solving them. If this process is implemented correctly, products will create value for customers due to the exhaustive research and testing and go on to be successful.
Brilliant entrepreneurs don't really start out with concrete goals, but they constantly assess how to get their vision into peoples hands and reacting creatively. It's the age where advanced technology is "easily" accessible to most organizations, only the ones that learn to quickly adapt to change survive. Doesn't matter if it's a startup or a well established enterprise.
Products should not get developed or launched until they're assured to have a customer base ready and waiting. The entrepreneur's role is not to lead customers to the problem. The less leading while hearing your problem getting mentioned, the more validation you get.
The customer development model has 4 parts:
Customer d…

There are multiple responsibilities to a product manager. I'm going to go through some of them because the ideal product manager is a T shaped individual, with deep knowledge in one field and multiple experiences in other fields. An ideal product manager should have experienced every role in the PDLC (Product development life cycle).
Strategy and vision
A first key responsibility is about strategy. Strategy needs to be clearly articulated to the product team so they understand the intent behind the new product or iteration. The "why" needs to be supported with data and results from the customer development phase.
The strategy must also make mid or long term sense to the business goals of the company.
To be more specific, the product manager needs to make sure stakeholders, the product team, sales and marketing understands what is going to be built, what the customer value is, what pain is it solving and who the product is for.
Roadmap
After the "what" is articul…

Product management is the process where a product owner/manager translates customer pains into solution requirements while making sure the solution is profitable to their business. The product manager needs to bring clarity to their team.

So I started arguing that product management is a process. While the product manager has multiple jobs to do (will detail on this later) product management is the process where there is a clear communication path from the validated customer pain to each granular task that goes into the backlog and eventually gets shipped back to the customer. If we live in an alternate universe, things stop here. But usually customers come with feedback and lots of it.

The product management process The ideal process is when features or product ideas come form a validated market need (there are other cases, but I won't cover them in this post).
A validated market need is when a customer segment has an important problem and "hacked" a solution together t…

There are many definitions, but you can basically "feel" product-market fit when the market pulls product out of the startup (as defined by Marc Andreessen in the only thing that matters). Customers are banging on your door to get the product and this is your first API performance/load test - usage is growing as fast as you can add more servers.

Your product does not have to be great. it has to barely work and solve the market problem. The market does not care about how good the team is either, as long as it can produce a satisfactory product.
There is only one way to strive for this holy grail that is called product-market fit. Doing customer development. I always imagine the market as one circle, and the product as another. Finding product-market fit is a process in which you either move the product to overlap the market or vice-versa. You may pivot (change product or market) until you have fit. 
You can always feel when this isn't happening: usage isn't growing, p…