What is customer development?

Customer development is a process used by businesses and startups to identify and understand their customers' needs, problems, and behaviors. It involves engaging directly with potential customers to test assumptions, gather feedback, and refine products or services before fully launching them to the market. The goal of customer development is to ensure that a business is creating something that people actually want, reducing the risk of product failure. This approach is a core component of the Lean Startup methodology and helps companies build better products by learning from real customer interactions.