476: How to Pivot Quickly, with Steve Blank

Coaching for Leaders

Dave Stachowiak

Management, Careers, Business

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2020

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Steve Blank: The Startup Owner’s Manual

Steve Blank is a Silicon Valley serial-entrepreneur and academician. He is recognized for developing the Customer Development methodology, which launched the Lean Startup movement. Steve is also the co-founder of E.piphany.

His Google Tech talk, The Secret History of Silicon Valley, offers a widely regarded insider’s perspective on the emerging Silicon Valley’s start-up innovation. He’s also published three books: The Four Steps to the Epiphany*, Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost, and The Startup Owner’s Manual*.

In this conversation, Steve and I discuss the steps that leaders should take when making pivots. We explored the importance of creating a Minimal Viable Product or Minimum Viable Service, followed quickly with customer discovery, rapid testing, and refinement.

Key Points

What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. -Friedrich Nietzsche

To pivot quickly:

Create a MVP (Minimal Viable Product) or MVS (Minimum Viable Service).
Conduct customer discovery: validate your idea by speaking with existing/potential customers about the new product/service.
Do rapid testing: get your work into the hands of existing/potential customers quickly. Don’t try to get it perfect right out of the gate.
Refine your offering: use fast feedback to make the product/service better.

Resources Mentioned

Related Episodes

Ideas Worth Stealing From Top Entrepreneurs, with Dorie Clark (episode 318)
Serve Others Through Marketing, with Seth Godin (episode 381)
How to Build an Invincible Company, with Alex Osterwalder (episode 470)
If You Build It, They Will Come (Dave’s Journal)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The world has changed a lot recently and it will change again.
0:04.3	How is your organization adapting?
0:07.0	On this episode Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur Steve Blank on how to pivot quickly to respond to a new reality.
0:15.0	This is Coaching for Leaders, episode 476.
0:19.2	Produced by Innovate Learning,
0:21.6	Maximizing Human Potential. Innovate learning, learning, maximizing human potential.
0:23.6	Greetings to you from Orange County, California.
0:30.7	This is coaching for leaders and I'm your host Dave Stahoviac. Leaders aren't born,
0:36.6	they're made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful
0:41.4	conversations.
0:43.0	So many of us are navigating change right now,
0:46.5	an incredible amount of change that really in some ways
0:50.0	we haven't seen at this speed in a long time and it is requiring many of us to think about
0:56.0	how we pivot quickly in our work and in our leadership today.
1:01.3	I'm so glad to welcome someone who is absolutely an
1:03.8	expert at helping leaders and entrepreneurs be able to make changes, to be able to
1:09.1	learn, to be able to serve customers well, and I know is going to help us to do this better.
1:14.2	I'm glad to welcome Steve Blank to the show.
1:16.3	Steve is a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and academia.
1:20.2	He is recognized for developing the customer development methodology, which launched the lean startup movement.
1:25.8	He is also the co-founder of Epiphany.
1:28.4	Steve spent over 30 years within the high-tech industry and has founded or worked within eight startup companies
	...

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