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donald mcmichael

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Which to employ Customer Development or Design Thinking

questionmark240x150The answer is it depends. Although both place great emphasis on learning what works or does’t from customers they are quite different tools. The key to selecting which might workout best is to understand the culture of your organization – fast, slow, process focused, urgency to gain traction – and thus the implied urgency. Startups are all about gaining a toe-hold, while established concerns are dominated by process, procedures and incentives tuned to help generate predictable revenue and profits. “This real sense of urgency—and how it shapes employee attitudes and practices – is a big reason why innovation processes in startups are different from those in large companies.” says Steve Blank (@steveblank) in this post. Bottom-line Design Thinking works best where time allows one to methodically extract market desires. Customer Development, on the other hand,  is geared towards finding customers now for an already conceived product/service.

Filed Under: blog, Business Strategy, Sharing Tagged With: Strategic Planning

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Donald McMichael
Insights for entrepreneurial leaders that help them answer two fundamental questions "Where should we play?" and "How do we win?".

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Recent Posts

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“At the end of the day, finance leaders have to be proper storytellers. You have to be constantly on top of your data and tell the story behind the numbers... The CFO has to be on top of information flow at all times.”

Gerardo Adame, VP Finance at XP Power, and Mark Partin, CFO of BlackLine

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