Customer-Driven Product Development: Building a SaaS

As technologists, we love to build things. And we sometimes forget that our customers (or potential customers) don’t care about what we’re building – they care about what they’re building, doing, or feeling. In this talk, we explore methodologies that help us continually focus on our customers’ needs, building just enough to learn and iterate toward their desired outcomes. Coming away from this, you’ll have a few more tools in the toolbox for your lean startup.

• [Slides] (https://www.slideshare.net/JakeLevirne/digitalocean-saas-webinar-jake-levirne)
• Extended Q&A

Concepts & Guides

• Jobs to Be Done
• Design Thinking
• GROWS Method
• The Beginner’s Guide to SEO
• The Ultimate Guide to Calculating, Understanding, and Improving CAC in 2020

Blog posts

• If There Aren’t Any Typos In This Essay, We Launched Too Late!, by Reid Hoffman, via LinkedIn
• If You’re Not Embarrassed By Your Startup, You Launched Too Late, by Chris Castiglione, via One Month
• How to Prototype a New Business, via IDEO U
• A step-by-step guide to using Outcome Driven Innovation (ODI), by Xavier Russo, Envato
• 10 Cognitive Biases That Distort Your Thinking, by Kendra Cherry, via Verywell Mind

Books

• The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries
• Running Lean, by Ash Maurya

Talks

• How to Position Your Idea with User Research, with Colleen Diez, DigitalOcean

Tools

• Get Feedback, an online survey software

Jake Levirne is Senior Director of Product Management for Developer Experience at DigitalOcean. He loves working with startups and helping build products that are simple, intuitive, and that get the job done. His personal mission is to help more people realize they can build anything they want.