Agile development and customer development

The core DNA of Lean Startup is a beautiful helix. The two loops of this helix focus on two ideas that lie at the heart of the Lean methodology--agile development and customer development. Tied together, these two approaches enable developers to create products that are truly user-driven.

The outer loop of the helix involves working with the market to discover customer needs and the context in which they emerge, and to test whether possible solutions meet these needs. Originally coined by Steve Blank, this loop is known as customer development.

The inner loop involves a rapid iterative software development cycle of understanding needs identified by customer development and developing solutions that meet these needs:

Agile development has matured over the last decade, and Scrum and XP are common today in many organizations. Agile radically changed organizations that were used to building software in large monolith waterfall releases by moving them to an iterative model. This enables teams to work more closely with customers to build software.

Where waterfall models usually expect that the problem definition was fixed, Agile practitioners went in with the assumption that the problem definition may be somewhat fluid. Note that in both cases, the solution is unknown. The engineering team works a close loop to iterate through solution definition, with the understanding that the problem definition may evolve along the way.

While waterfall and Agile both assume some level of definition of the problem, customer development is all about problem discovery. We start with exploring an unknown problem through customer discovery, an open-ended exercise to find unmet needs. This then leads to a rapid cycle of working early and often with customers to validate their needs and then to scale the model.

Applying these ideas in conjunction with one another will allow you to respond to customer feedback, adapt more quickly, and create useful products that customers love. Your very first step in that direction will be an experiment that tests hypotheses about your business plan, your customers, and your app idea.