Yet anyone who has ever taken a new product out to a set of potential customers can tell you
that a good day in front of customers is two steps forward and one step back. In fact, the best way to
represent what happens outside the building is more like a series of recursive circles—recursive to
represent the iterative nature of what actually happens in a learning and discovery environment.
Information and data are gathered about customers and markets incrementally, one step at a time.
Yet sometimes those steps take you in the wrong direction or down a blind alley. You find yourself
calling on the wrong customers, not understanding why people will buy, not understanding what
product features are important. The ability to learn from those missteps is what distinguishes a
successful startup from those whose names are forgotten among the vanished.
Like all startups focused on executing to plan, Webvan hired a vice president of merchandising, a
vice president of marketing and a vice president of product management—three groups that were
6 | The Four Steps to the Epiphany
oriented around executing a sales strategy, not learning and discovering customer needs. Sixty days
after first customer ship these three groups employed over fifty people.