Cindy Alvarez

Workshop

Customer Development: That’s Not What Your Customer Meant

“Getting out of the building” is a great first step. But to some degree, what we hear and observe is what we want to. Confirmation biases are our brains’ hacks for assimilating the millions of pieces of information we encounter each minute. But they are an obstacle to rigorously invalidating our hypotheses!

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Keynote

Closing Keynote: Why Customer Development Isn't Working

There are teams right now who are forming hypotheses and seeking out relevant customers to invalidate them. They're uncovering great insights and identifying competitive product opportunities and bringing those back to their team. And then... the company ignores them in favor of what their 'gut' says to do. Why does this happen? How can we stop it?

It's not hopeless, but it's a lot harder than just chatting on the phone with your target customers. In this talk, I'll explain what we're up against and why we're so resistant to invalidated hypotheses and overturned assumptions. And better yet, how we can anticipate challenges and work against the cognitive biases and the dozens of tactical obstacles that work to keep the status quo in place.

keynote Customer Development MVP Corporate innovation

About Cindy Alvarez

Cindy Alvarez is the author of Lean Customer Development: Build Products Your Customers Will Buy. She’s the director of user experience for Yammer (a Microsoft company), and is enthusiastically coaching internal Microsoft teams towards becoming more experimental, change-seeking, and customer focused.

Alvarez is a frequent speaker on UX, Lean, and tech culture. Tweets: Blogs: www.cindyalvarez.com