What is Customer development and how to do it well?

What is Customer development and how to do it well? 2026 is the best time to build anything; especially software. Why? 

• Prototyping and mock ups creation takes 10% of the time it used to take. Apps like "Banani" give you ready made layouts for both desktop and mobile apps. I am sure you have seen this. 

• Any and every programming language is abstracted. You need not get a software degree to code. You can give an easy prompt and you get code as output. If you play with approximately 10k+ lines of code, eventually you will learn to read and orchestrate it. 

• Launching servers, deployments, test cases, etc. is also automated … 🎖️ 

My understanding only revolves around software; however you may be seeing similarities everywhere. So building/ development is easy. There are still nuances such as compliance, security, which should be taken care of. There are agents for that as well if understood well. 

Where this lands us is that we need to have an idea and an approach to validate that idea at a reasonable cost. That is where customer development comes in. 

What is customer development? Customer development is an approach to build something hand in hand with the customer. 

Customer development is also known as customer co-creation, one-time development (OTD) and similar … 😀  

Why do customer development?

• Doing research about an idea usually takes time. The idea needs to be vetted well and the problem space also should be studied well to understand the potential of it for the next 10 years. This takes time/ money. 

• We need to find the right prospects. Sometimes it is harder to find the right people who use the product/ will benefit from the use case. This also takes time/ money. 

• Even if these things happen, one more and most important thing is needed and that is willingness to pay. Unless the prospects/ customers sees and experiences something they may not be moved. And movement is directly correlated to their willingness to pay. 

Customer development solves all these and reduces risk of building something which no one wants and is willing to pay for. Validation of the hypothesis is key. 

What is the prospect/ customer thinking about Customer development? 

• I myself am not sure about the use case. This challenge exists, however can it be executed so we can benefit from it … 🙋 

• Our ecosystem is unique. Our requirements are unique. That is why existing players in the market may not be able to do this with their out of the box solutions. 

Keep in mind that doing customer development for mature products is a bit harder. It may become baggage on existing teams as they have defined tasks needed to serve the existing customers. 

If the product requirements are small, it is not possible to do it. Scope should be sufficient to help a b2b enterprise team do their tasks faster and more efficiently. 

How to do customer development well? 

Here are suggested steps. These steps may vary based on size of the company, domain they operate in, complexity, and so on. 

• Create a well defined hypothesis for Customer development. It should include business problems, solution definitions, value to be delivered and so on. 

• A rough prototype always helps. Story format is much better if it is combined with prototypes/ mock ups. 

• Cold messages, known companies, partners, competitors - any channel through which we can show the prototype and understand willingness to pay and how much that payment would be? … ☎️

• Be transparent with the customer about customer development and mention that we wish to work hand in hand with you in solving this. 

• Validate and iterate the solution, onboarding of users, workflows if any. 

Customer development reduces guess work and risk. I have seen amazing market depth and insights coming from customer development initiatives … 🪗  

Whoever participates in customer development, they become your early adopter and advocates. Customer development reduces the cost of execution by validating the hypothesis/ idea upfront. This is very amazing. 

Happy customer development/ building with Customers …