BLANK CANVAS
Blank set out to develop a way to launch a startup knowing little to nothing about the customer or competitors, their products and their pricing—a typical situation versus that of a large company. He came up with a method “to manage chaos and uncertainty,” using three basic principles. (SOURCE: Steve Blank)
Step Two: Get out of the building.
“There are no facts inside your building, so get
the hell outside,” Blank said of
the customer development process he created. This involves talking to at least 100 potential customers and stakehold- ers about your hypotheses. In his Hack- ing for Defense class at Stanford, Blank requires students to talk to 100 to 150 people about defining the problem, pos- sible solutions and iterations of possible solutions. “You’re not just asking them what they need and want.”
Step Three: Build a minimum viable product (MVP). This isn’t a prototype, but “it’s an incremental and iterative test of ‘Do I understand what this problem is and what a potential solution could look like?’ … On Week One, it might be a PowerPoint slide or an Excel spread- sheet, then it might be a wireframe or a cardboard mock-up or some non- working mechanical, and eventually it becomes something that looks like the finished product.”
Finally, prepare
to follow an often-
repeated Silicon Valley maxim: “Fail fast, fail often.” This means repeating the lean process over and over again, refining and revising the MVP based on customer
feedback—iteration—and
possibly even overhauling your defini- tion of the problem—pivoting.
CONCLUSION
“This methodology has been adopted by every startup in Silicon Valley in the last 10 years,” Blank said. And it has spread to NSF, NIH and other federal research agencies, as well as some intelligence agencies. Corporations large and small are also adopting it. Blank’s cover story (“a hell-freezes-over moment,” he noted) in the May 2013 Harvard Business Re- view, “Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything,” defined the lean startup movement to the corporate world out- side Silicon Valley.
“In the 21st century, the rules are differ- ent than they were in the 20th century,” Blank said. “In the 20th century, a cor-
poration’s average life cycle, from start until typically when they went out of business, was 60 years. In the 21st cen- tury already, the average corporation survives for 15 years. What happened? It’s not that companies have gotten stu- pider, it’s that the world has changed. All the rules you learned in the 20th century as a corporate executive are just obsolete. Why? Well, the obvious ones in the business world: China as a manufacturer. China as a customer. The internet lets pricing and branding change radically. You can know price in any part of the world, and you can create a brand in a week. … If you’re a large company CEO and you had skills only focused on execution, that worked when Jack Welch was CEO of GE [be- tween 1981 and 2001], but it doesn’t work anymore in the 21st century.”
For more information, go to www.
steveblank.com.
—MR. MICHAEL BOLD
ASC.ARMY.MIL
127
CRITICAL THINKING
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