For this interview, I had the pleasure to talk to Douwe Wester and Edouard Dopper, co-founders at leanup.nl and experts in lean startup methodology, agile methodology, scrum management and innovation models for large companies.

Douwe and Edouard say that one of the most common mistakes in the startup world is to start with building a product without truly understanding the problem to be solved and the riskiest assumptions that are the foundation of your business model. So what is the a better way? Start with the customer understanding

Customer Understanding

Step 1: understand the problem you are trying to solve

Step 2: understand who has that problem, define the archetype(s) of the customer

Step 3: see if you can find more people that display similar archetype behavior

Step 4: do market sizing as a reality check

Step 5: create and iterate Influence maps