While in Boston, Jason Evanish made a name for himself as a customer-focused entrepreneur. He caught the eye of  Hiten Shah, the founder of KISSmetrics. Hiten asked Jason to leave Boston, and move to the Valley to become KISSmetric’s Product Manager.

Since then, he’s become known as a generous teacher; especially when it comes to customer development, pattern matching, and product development.

In this candid interview, Jason shares what he’s learned so far leading product at KISSmetrics.

Highlights

• “Your assumptions are not necessarily true.”
• “Customer development is a series of tactics to get to the core of what a customer really is. You find out what there problem is, and create a solution that can really delight them. The challenge is that customers won’t flat out tell you what they need. You need a process to draw it out of them.”
• “If you want to get the politics out of your organization, become a data-driven company. Now you have numbers and data.”
• “A lot of people think customer development is highly subjective. The key is you need to trust the interpreter. If you were having someone translate from Chinese to English, you would need to trust the person doing the interpretation.”
• “What kind of data should you track? Look at feature adoption rates: what do people actually use?”

Sponsors

• Our premium sponsor is Sprint.ly. Sprint.ly is agile project management software with one goal: to help you ship more stuff. You can try them out for free at  www.sprint.ly. You can also thank them on Twitter:  @sprintly

Shout outs

• Shout out #1:  Sam Baumgarten – learn about creating web apps. Check out Sam Baumgarten’s blog to learn about creating web apps and get updates on his projects such as Nathan Barry’s ConvertKit.  sambaumgarten.me

🎙️ Podcast hosting is provided by Transistor.fm.
📺 Learn how to start your own podcast!