This process framework will help you to plan and implement a Customer development program from its beginning to end. Designed in Airtable and Google Sheets it works as a flexible and customisable framework it provides all the necessary details about every stage of the projects and gives links to other free and paid frameworks, useful articles.

The framework covers 5 stages of an average customer development program:

1. Intro
   whether you run it inside or hire an external team, make sure to go through these steps so your project has all the necessary inputs.
2. Research program design & plan
   the most complicated and important part. The quality of your plan and briefs will define the success. Most internal teams in our experience ignore critical inputs, requirements and hesitate describing both sample requirements and interview guides what usually leads to inconsistent and poor data from interviews. To avoid this, we use our CustDev / User research program brief & Report templates.
3. Implementation
   this is a simple part if everything is done correctly on the previous stages, but here we also provide a list of recommendations and hints that will help you to recruit respondents better and faster, to get the most out of conversations with them. Interview transcription templates will help to manage your data in a consistent and concise way.
4. Analysis‍
   This stage requires a lot of attention and focus along with an unbiased attitude. This is why we always offer to run it with us as external product managers and analysts — those who are not influenced by internal plans, KPIs, policies and etc. Our customers find that external analysis and honest interpretation always give stronger insights.
5. Workshops
   To help research project turn into actionable inputs for the backlog, we design a special report and workshop template. At this phase, you would want to make sure that the whole team aware about the learnings and understands the insights, has a common view on how to act based on this new information. We always offer a facilitated workshop as a final part of the project.

This process could look complicated, but only if you do this for the first time. Our templates will help to shorten the learning curve. Want a full professional support? We are ready to set up and run a program for you.

Airtable base template offers three key views:

• Grid view — task list grouped by project stages
• Gantt chart — tasks and dependancies
• Timeline — simplified project outline in a timeline format that can also be presented in a Calendar view.

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