Technologists never seem to have a shortage of ideas about possible application areas for their technologies. But unless the technologist's sponsors have deep pockets and inexhaustible patience, the enthusiasm of these technologists will usually not be sufficient by itself to fuel the required effort to bring these ideas to fruition across a product's lifecycle, since sponsor priorities and available resources wax and wane with time.

The first customers of new things are called innovators and early adopters, and they receive this label because of their pioneering spirit. Being the first to the finish line with the next new thing could enable them to exploit first mover advantages over competitors. But customers in this red zone typically must exhibit a higher than average tolerance to the uncertainties which predominate this region of technology adoption.

In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore describes the challenge of spanning the gap between these innovators and early adopters, and the majority of other customers which may come out of the woodwork, once these pioneers have absorbed fate's stock of uncertainty arrows. Accelerating across this gap is usually critical to making the economics of any business endeavor work, as it determines how much momentum can be established for full scale product development in the project. But one should not just take leaps of faith based upon the enthusiasm or testimony of technologists about the value of their proposed new things. Just as references provided in employment applications can be manipulated to inflate expectations of potential performance, project endorsements can be secured from niche customers who are not necessarily representative of the market's most pressing needs. Even when projects are able to eventually deliver what these stakeholders need, they must achieve this delivery, and provide continued support, so in economically viable ways in order to make business sense for all concerned.

Everyone traverses this adoption lifecycle with the best intentions. Technology innovators generate, discover, or become aware of candidate component technology with characteristics that suggest breakthrough performance. It is easy to envision introducing such components as a single key that will unlock high value, much as one might substitute one part in a machine for another. But human nature causes us all to over-simplify the complexity of such substitutions, and under-estimate the width of the gap that must be crossed to achieve viable economics and service-readiness in products. Customers have problems that need solving, and technology solutions are not always the best answer for those problems. Problems are best resolved by attacking the intrinsic difficulties which constrain the realization of value and generate waste. These constraints include

• Lack of clarity about the most critical situations which customers find themselves in, and what attributes are essential in products that are intended to help in these situations
• Uncertainties about the means of production to deliver and support customers in those situations
• Assumptions about team's behaviors and their underlying beliefs and motivations
• Scarcity in resources required to perform work

These roadblocks are why software-intensive projects fail so frequently. According to Steve McConnell, failure rates are as high as 75% across the technology industry. This means that decisions to invest in such new ventures should be made deliberately and reviewed regularly. These decision-making processes must integrate information about the discoveries that are made while searching for solutions, and be willing to adjust project requirements and targets, and re-evaluate continued investments, should this information indicate that these projects will no longer will yield the value originally intended or required for adequate returns on investments.

Stakeholders that participate in such projects will have many different perspectives that must be considered and communicated.  Some of these stakeholders will be sophisticated about evaluating the value of changes from a business's perspective, and others may instead suggest changes which provide benefits only to the role they most frequently operate within. In either case, it is easy to be technologically or systematically naive about where the real constraints will arise in most situations. In this climate, solution providers need to borrow, combine, and fill in the missing pieces from many innovation sources in order to weave together a balanced solution.

To be viable, projects must amortize the costs of developing these founding ideas into solutions that work across a target customer base. When that base is sufficiently broad, implementation can be made affordable. When solutions meet expectations, businesses will have the opportunity to cash in on their original investments. When they do not, such pursuits can distract businesses from focusing on other, more valuable endeavors. Delaying the realization of required benefits can be hazardous to any business's health.

This is not an easy task, for, as John Sterman describes, a synthesis of customer choices must be developed:

Since this synthesis of a product's vision and requirements are such critical guideposts, any project should focus its early efforts on customer development. The primary objective of customer development activities is to see if there are enough 'paying' customers who will rally around the vision of the product, and help the development team evolve this vision into a workable solution.  It is not enough to simply discover customers that are willing to embrace high-level ideas expressed in the vagueness of language. Innovators and early adopters are by their nature starters who will rapidly embrace technology, but will likely be fickle when the next new idea is identified. These early adopters are also unlikely to be sufficiently representative of the market segments which solutions are ultimately intended to serve. By their nature, such innovators are starters, not finishers, and can often be fickle in their interests.

Once technologists realize that selling a rough concept to a broad market is both time consuming and frustrating, they have two choices: to focus exclusively on one client, or to do the hard work of customer development. The latter path is the optimum one for a business's long-term success, even though it requires broad participation and active listening. Customer development requires eliciting enough details from a range of customers to justify, shape, elaborate, and implement needed changes to ideas and concepts in a collaborative manner; the goal of this effort is that everyone embraces a shared and meaningful vision that can be elaborated. Such customer development requires discovering the critical information details that enable meaningful project decision-making, and that enables everyone to be successful in the long run. Many new ventures devote too much of their time and effort in trying various product configurations in isolation, before they have validated their business assumptions, discovered the best market for their products, and positioned themselves for the required customer involvement that is essential to continued growth and success. There are often alternative (and simpler) ways of problem solving that can only be discovered through this customer collaboration and refinement of operational concepts. 

It can often be difficult to find enough customers that have enough in common to span this technology adoption gap. Each new customer typically wants a solution that is appropriate to their unique environment. Yet often, they don't want to or can't bear the full costs of development and associated lifecycle support for that custom solution by themselves. As a result, technology providers must learn to position their products to appeal to the broadest possible market, and find the affordable sweet spot across all targeted market segments.

According to Steven Gary Blank, author of one of the most popular handbooks for startups in Silicon Valley, the product manager responsible for this required customer development to be successful:

1. The capacity to understand customer problems and environments from their perspective
2. The ability to listen and respond to customer objections to the product, rather than the pitch, the pricing, or the relationship fit.
3. Experience in elaborating the details required to provide utility to innovators and early adopters.
4. A balanced approach to architecture that will minimize required rework over the longer term and provide required scalability and robustness
5. Willingness to accept changes
6. Resilience in integrating changes in a coherent way across the solution

One might think that this customer development is easier when you are working with internal organizations, rather than the broader marketplace. However, as Jim McCarthy reminds us, these types of relationships bring their own challenges:

The first step in this customer development process is to arrange to have enough access to a representative set of lead users.  Eric Hoppel has discussed this challenge extensively, and emphasizes the importance of identifying these lead users to help to validate hypotheses about the the problem statements value of proposed solutions and gather required facts before investing significantly in opportunities that have not had the details fleshed out. In the Four Steps to the Epiphany, author Steven Gary Blank discusses the importance of identifying such lead ducks (er, users) to help  cross this chasm. Blank identifies 5 characteristics of these 'Earlyvangelists':

1. They have a problem
2. They know they have a problem
3. They have been actively looking for a solution to their problem
4. They have parts of the solution (but have not overly constrained the design space for a total solution)
5. They have or can acquire budget to help develop the solution into a useable form for their purposes

Since it typically will take several iterations of this collaboration to find an acceptable solution, such lead customers need to be risk sharing partners by financing their own participation. If you can't find enough of these kinds of customers to rally around a proposed solution's initial vision, you better spend more time discovering what the silent majority really needs and are will pay for, and revise your vision accordingly.

The second step is to conduct structured interviews across target market segments to frame the problem. These interviews should consist of a uniform set of prompts for dialog, followed by a deeper, more probing set of questions to uncover desired actions under different operational scenarios. These questions should seek to identify the set of actions, attributes, and objects which must interact to achieve the desired business results. Workshops may also be helpful in generating solution ideas during this process. For example, a series of sessions can explore user needs within small groups from their different perspectives, and synthesize the results into a series of statements which fit this template:

Under <scenario> condition(s), <action(s)> by <object> will produce <end results>?

These templates are helpful in synthesizing a top-level tier of requirements for subsequent elaboration.

The third step to crossing this gap is to work together with customers to draft candidate statements of the problems that customers need to have solved within these operational scenarios. The underlying limitations which customers encounter are usually best uncovered by asking the question 'Why' a lot. Critical thinking skills can then be used to begin synthesizing a statement of the problem in written form. A problem's definition attempts to:

• Express the pain that is being experienced in concrete terms
• Characterize the gain that could be realized by proposed solutions
• Identify the constraints which preclude achieving these gains today, and connect these causes with the effects they produce on customers
• View the situation from multiple perspectives

The final step in crossing this gap is to produce a shared vision, an elevator speech, and a project pitch. These materials are critical to securing sponsorship and funding for follow-on work. The materials must strive for simplicity and balance across stakeholders and time horizons, and realistically assess the risks of implementation and the opportunities to achieve improvements. The language used in such pitches should be crisp, sticky, and consistent with the customer's mental models, and should focus on the unique capabilities which the project will deliver. The information should also describe what it will take to achieve the product's vision over time, and highlight the critical functions and performance that will be essential for realizing business results. There is an art to crafting this presentation, and it is a great time to bring in others who have not been actively involved in your project, but have succeeded within this project launch environment, to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your material and how you deliver it, as each are refined over time.

Unless projects are launched with this foundation, the development of new solutions is likely run into many roadblocks, and take significantly longer and cost much more than forecasts project.  The team's first work product should be a proposed system's concept of operations, project plan, and requirements that the lead customers will enthusiastically embrace. From that foundation, prototyping can be used to reduce risk and demonstrate the feasibility of these concepts, so that full-scale product development can be performed with acceptable risk. Once this foundation is established, the resulting product development team will be able to draw energy from a broad set of committed sponsors, and will have an increased ability to achieve real breakthroughs as a result of this foundation.

Once we have determined that the problem is adequately defined in this way, we can set about to determine how to solve it. Only then can we begin to plan what resources will be needed over time in order to develop a service-ready solution.