"Can it not all be summed up as 'talk to your customers?' Isn't this the foundation of any business? Does anyone actually advocate not doing so?"
I don't think anyone advocates not talking to your customers, but Steve Blank makes a bigger point than that.
The point isn't just to talk to your customers. It's that the CEO, the founders, the people with the control have to talk to the customers.
A lot of companies have the CEO, the programming team, and the rest of the decision makers relatively isolated from the customers, whereas the sales team is the one out there talking to customers every day.
This isolation still makes it look like the company is talking to customers (they have sales out there, every day, listening to customer feedback). But because the real decision makers aren't themselves experiencing the way the customers use their product, they'll never understand it the way they need to to keep making their product better.
I don't think anyone advocates not talking to your customers, but Steve Blank makes a bigger point than that.
The point isn't just to talk to your customers. It's that the CEO, the founders, the people with the control have to talk to the customers.
A lot of companies have the CEO, the programming team, and the rest of the decision makers relatively isolated from the customers, whereas the sales team is the one out there talking to customers every day.
This isolation still makes it look like the company is talking to customers (they have sales out there, every day, listening to customer feedback). But because the real decision makers aren't themselves experiencing the way the customers use their product, they'll never understand it the way they need to to keep making their product better.