1.
Big Data Solutions
Customer
Development
Guide
Vasyl Magora, Product Manager
May 2018
Already known theoretical best
practices peppered with some
adjustments from real life

2.
What’s the plan?
● Where to start?
● What’s the action plan?
● How to perform?
● What to expect?
● Recommended literature

3.
Four-step process
1. Customer discovery
first captures the founders’ vision and turns it into a series of business model hypotheses. Then it develops
a plan to test customer reactions to those hypotheses and turn them into facts
1. Customer validation
tests whether the resulting business model is repeatable and scalable. If not, founders should return to
customer discovery
1. Customer creation
is the start of execution. It builds end-user demand and drives it into the sales channel to scale the
business
1. Company building transitions
the organization from a startup to a company focused on executing a validated model

4.
Warning! It is not “Abs just in 8
minutes” exercise...

5.
Important
You should have deliverables
from every item in more or less
details as an arguments for
validation and further
discussions.
Any format works fine.

6.
Hold on for a
minute...
Plan up front how you gonna
organize gathered content.

7.
Base line
Use company mission and vision as
main guide to define the
direction.
Have a clear understanding the
“why” of the company existence.
Have a clear understanding of
general capabilities of company
employees.
...are you sure that you know it?
Is it described clearly somewhere?
Something interesting here

8.
Let’s perform some Customer Discovery
Perform a research of existing Big Data case studies and use cases.
Get the good understanding of current state of the market.

9.
Customer Discovery
Brainstorm problems that could be solved according to mission and vision
of the company and with such skill sets. Prioritize.
Brainstorm targeted audience that could have such problems. Prioritize
(with separation on buyer and user persona):
● Ideal customer
● Customers with whom you do not mind to work
● Customers whose problems you will not solve
Use these priorities for next action items

10.
Customer Discovery
Pick first with the most priority and move
a little further...
Customers have _______ problem
Customers are willing to invest _______ to solve this problem
Stakeholders involved in using/buying this product are ______
Partners involved in building/distributing this product are _
Resources required in building/servicing this product are ___
If customers did not buy/use our product, they would buy/use __
Once customers are using our product, they will gain _____
This problem affects our customers _______
Customers are already using tools like _______
Customer purchasing decisions are influenced by _______
Customers have [job title] or [social identity]
This product will be useful to our customers because _______
Customers’ comfort level with technology is ___
Customers’ comfort level with change is ___
It will take _______ to build/produce this product
It will take _______ to get X customers or X% usage

11.
Customer Discovery
All of that you performed in order to create the hypothesis that got
clear enough message.
Use existing content and knowledge to narrow down the hypothesis in form
of press release with using Working Backwards approach.
Look here and then here for guidance
Perform short additional investigations in order to accomplish press release

12.
Customer Discovery
Before you move forward...
Create the 30 second elevator speech for each hypothesis
if you don’t have it in your press-release yet

13.
Customer Discovery
Create value proposition with using: Value Proposition Canvas
Source for the information:
● Content created previously
● Interviews with targeted audience (Ideal customer)
○ Do not talk about your solution yet
● Interviews with sales and marketing, others
● Researches and reports though internet
● Feedback from previous customers
Here's something short and could be helpful

14.
Customer Discovery
If you need a questionnaire for interviews with the targeted audience
this one looks good to start with.
Adjust questions accordingly to your needs.
TIP: the main idea is to reproduce the vision of the world of the target audience and
understand 1.where? 2.when? 3.why? 4.how? they should find you and 5.decide that they need
what you are offering.

15.
Customer Discovery
Perform market and competitors analysis to find out how unique is your
value proposition.
Use this

16.
Customer Discovery
You need something with what you can go to your targeted audience to
validate you hypothesis. Depends on you case it could be one of these:
- The content created with help of sales and marketing
- case studies
- Use cases
- The POC that you have created internally to demo them externally
- The MVP that you have build with the team.

17.
Customer Discovery
And the last one...
If you did everything good enough sales are able to create a sales or
product funnel depends on the need in your case.
Not on your own. CEO, sales and marketing. They should be involved necessarily.

18.
Customer Discovery

19.
Customer Discovery

20.
Customer
Discovery

21.
Customer Validation
What would be the measurements for your validation?
● the level of traction?
● the users with downloads that were converted to customers?
● the number of contracts signed per proposal?
Define KPI's and use prepared from previous phase deliverables for
validation.
NOW GO GET SOME VALIDATION!
You should have first numbers for sales forecast and business model creation.

22.
Customer Validation
Sales and marketing together with you should work on marketing and sales
roadmap based on inputs that you have gathered on previous steps.

23.
Customer Validation
Create the business model canvas and fill it with already gathered info.
Work with stakeholders from your company to get it done:
● CEO, sales, marketing, product managers, others that could help with that
● or perform additional researches to finish it up.
Check this as a short intro or This as a more detailed one
Make sure that your model is repeatable and scalable

24.
Customer
Creation
Now you are prepared and ready
to start the execution...

25.
Customer Creation
All KPI’s already prepared.
Use existing metrics frameworks to help you better understand your
consumers.
Execute Customer Creation according to the prepared marketing and sales
plan.
Measure results.

26.
Company
Building
Are you sure that your
operations are ready to handle
all these customers that gonna
come up?

27.
Company Building
Create company scalability strategy for:
● Organizational scalability
● Operations scalability
But if you are reading this presentation you don’t need a detailed information on company
scalability yet, until you are done with the previous steps :)

28.
Thank you!

29.
Oops, I forgot...

30.
Recommended
literature
● Lean Customer Development
● Value Proposition Canvas
● Business Model Canvas
● Lean Start-up

31.
Bye now...