Make starting with customers a habit that you exercise without thinking. It's the easiest "hack" you achieve as you develop your product.

As Lean Customer Development author Cindy Alvarez writes, "Customer development starts with a shift in mindset. Instead of assuming that your ideas and intuitions are correct and embarking on product development, you will be actively trying to poke holes in your ideas, to prove yourself wrong, and to invalidate your hypotheses. " Cindy brought this discipline to KISSmetrics where she helped us build out our analytics product before heading to Yammer and Microsoft.

If you can figure out what your customers need-instead of what you think they need-you can use that knowledge to create something they'll actually pay for while you're still building your product. That's customer development in a nutshell.

Most founders and product managers fall flat when they try to solve their own problems. They're constantly told to "build for themselves," and create products that alleviate pain points that they've experienced first-hand.

This is great for starting out, but it's not enough to reach a wider market or build a sustainable business. There's one simple reason why: You are not your customer. There are way more of them than you.

If you don't build the habit of starting with your customers and understanding what makes them tick, you're not going to know how to meet their basic needs, let alone improve your product down
the line. You'll be unable to differentiate your product from the thousands already out there and will end up dead in the water.

It feels counterintuitive, but the early stages of product development aren't at all about your constraints or your resources. They're about focusing on what's important: the customer. The customer is the building block and everything you do should revolve around them.