The most inefficient way to test a business model or product idea is to plan and build a complete product to see whether the predicted market for it really exists. Yet this is exactly what we do once we have an approved business case. Part of the problem is the language we use to describe the product development process. For example, consider the term “requirements.” Whose requirements are they? Are they user requirements? In Lean IT, Steve Bell and Mike Orzen comment that “users are often unable to articulate exactly what they need, yet they often seem insistent about what they don’t
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