Top Highlights

• Products handed off to sales and marketing organizations that are only tangentially involved in the new-product development process will lose.
• Agile enough to deal with daily change and operating “without a map.”
• Webvan’s CEO and VPs all came from large-company backgrounds and experience. They were surprised and uncomfortable with the chaos of a startup and tried to solve the problem by scaling the company rapidly.
• In a startup, the founders define the product vision and then use customer discovery to find customers and a market for that vision.
• Customer validation proves that the business tested and iterated in customer discovery has a repeatable, scalable business model that can deliver the volume of customers required to build a profitable company.