The Four Steps to the Epiphany (Steven Blank)

As I started to dig in to the world of business modelling, Steve's name kept popping up. I poked around his blog and watched a few of the videos, and soon found that he's an excellent presenter with a lot of experience to share. So I was more than happy to find a weathered copy of "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" in the library.

The gist of the book is that one should not expect to be able to create a business plan, execute it and then just watch the money roll in. Business planning - just like product development - is an iterative, incremental process. Another important point is that new business development is in many respects the opposite of standard operations of established companies. This point he summarizes nicely in this blog entry.

The main content of the book is a detailed description of the process of taking an idea from inception to a successful business. The focus of this process lies on frequent and intensive interaction with the customer, and to stress this point, he uses the term Customer Development in contrast to Product Development. The process is described through advice and interesting examples from Steve's impressive career. The advice ranges from the quite abstract to very detailed practical pointers. As such, the book gives a bit of a piecemeal impression. It's all probably really good advice, but it makes the reading experience a bit hard.

Quite early along in the book, I realized that the structure of the process actually reads as a mind map. To keep things clear in my mind, I started recreating the mind map on a piece of paper. This is what the first two chapters look like as a mind map. I would be curious to see if the book would be an easier read if it were presented as a browsable process description rather than a paper book.

What Steve presents works well with the agile software development mindset. Where agilists strive to get early and frequent feedback about the product, Steve strives to get early and frequent feedback on the business model. He even uses agile terminology, such as "The ability to embrace constant change" (p. 39).

For me, a programmer and product developer at heart, this book painted a colorful picture of the business side of the story. In the agile world, we have lofty ideals about satisfying the customer, but rarely do we give credit to the hard work that is done in locating and establishing interaction with the customers to be satisfied by our brilliant products. At the very least, "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" should help us understand that rarely is business life so easy that "they will come if we build it."