Product Validation Frameworks are Mostly Useless Without Taste

Changing the product domain made it easier to navigate. You can have two product development processes: Ask customers what problems they have and build for them. Or you don't ask customers anything and rely on internal product leaders' taste and judgment. Customer obsession and taste are parallel paths to product success. Some domains, like Lean St... See more

A lot of products require a mixture of taste and customer obsession. So if you try to copy Amazon's PR/FAQ process without someone with product taste in the room, you're pretty likely to fail. There's also the tacit component to success, which is harder to articulate and, therefore, harder to acquire.

In college, the author started his first startup, and it failed. Before launch, he didn't talk to customers, he fought with his cofounders a lot. He didn't know how to build working software or deal with tech debt. He read Eric Ries's Lean Startup after this experience and vowed to use it. Since the insurance CRM was geared toward tracking existing... See more