Strategy, discovery, metrics, growth, pricing, design, delivery and leadership. Each entry says when it is the right one to pick up.
The fullest treatment of Jobs to Be Done from Christensen and colleagues. The argument is that customers hire products to make progress in a circumstance, and that the circumstance rather than the customer's attributes predicts purchase.
Torres describes a specific weekly cadence. You interview customers every week, map the space with an opportunity solution tree, and run small assumption tests against the ideas that tree produces.
Hansen wrote this after several thousand customer interviews conducted while bootstrapping a software business, and it is the most practical book available on the mechanics of the conversation itself.
Gottesdiener and Gorman set out a structured conversation for deciding what to build, run across three planning horizons, which are the whole product, the next release and the current iteration.
Adzic and Evans give fifty short, independent ideas for improving story practice, each a couple of pages with the idea, why it works and how to make it work. Organised into creating stories, planning with them, discussing them, and splitting them.
Cagan sets out how product teams at companies shipping continuously actually operate. Empowered teams are given problems rather than feature lists, a product manager is accountable for value and viability, and a designer and engineers are involved from the start.
Portigal's book on the craft of the interview itself. Covers preparation and recruiting, building rapport, the structure of a good interview guide, and the specific techniques of silence, follow up and asking for stories.
Hall's guide to doing research yourself rather than outsourcing it. Covers the research basics of asking answerable questions and avoiding bias, then works through organisational research, user research, competitive research, evaluative research and analysis.
Alvarez wrote a practical guide to customer development for people inside established companies rather than for founders, which is the gap the original literature left.
Young separates empathy as a research skill from sympathy and from simply being pleasant, and explains how to build a real understanding of how another person thinks.
The five day design sprint process from Google Ventures, written as a day by day operating manual. Monday maps the problem and picks a target, Tuesday sketches solutions, Wednesday decides and storyboards, Thursday builds a realistic prototype, Friday tests it with five customers.
Constable wrote eighty eight pages on the qualitative half of customer development, with a foreword by Steve Blank and cartoons by Tom Fishburne. It covers who to talk to, how to find them, how to structure the conversation, how …
Bland and Osterwalder catalogue forty four experiments for testing desirability, feasibility and viability, each with cost, setup time, evidence strength and reliability rated.
IDEO.org's guide to human centred design, written for people designing with communities rather than for consumer software, and useful well beyond that setting.
Blank's original customer development text, which the Lean Startup later popularised. The four steps are customer discovery, customer validation, customer creation and company building, each with entry and exit criteria.