Over Cindy Alvarez
Cindy Alvarez is the author of Lean Customer Development: How to Build Products Your Customers Will Buy.
Cindy has been using customer development techniques for well over a decade, across a variety of roles and organization sizes. She hates that alleged Henry Ford quote "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would've said 'a faster horse'."
After seeing many organizations struggle, she wrote _Lean Customer Development_ as practical, hands-on guide to effectively talk to customers. Through the tactics in the book, organizations will learn how to rigorously validate their ideas, differentiate customer 'wants' from 'needs', and build constant learning into their product development culture.
Cindy earned her bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard University, where she gained equally valuable insights working as a computer support tech. After college she moved to San Francisco, where she has worked in interaction design, customer research, and product management for both startups and Fortune 500 companies. In her current role she runs user experience and product design for Yammer (a Microsoft company) and evangelizes lean tactics throughout the company as part of Microsoft's UX Leadership Team.
