4 Steps and www.custdev.com both spoke loud and clear to me, I feel like I have been often told to go forth and sell, when the founder or CEO really means, please go find us some customers. Typically that involves a very consultative sales process with an early stage company or product, folks that didn't have a process or experience don't know the cost of the pain they are trying to solve and therefore don't really know the value of the solution. That said, I think that is isn't so much Blank v. Jobs, but how to know more about the user than the user does him(her)self. This might have been part of Jobs magic, know what the user want before they know it themselves. Assuming most of us don't have Job's genius then we need to fall back on user-centric design and persona to help drive the product development cycle. Oh yeah, and don't forget to talk to 30 or 40 prospective customers or buyers. "Talk" meaning, don't pitch, show demos, wire-frames, screenshots or rest, just ask them about their problems or pain points. What would a good solution look like, would they be willing to use or even buy a solution like that... Jakob http://www.useit.com/ and the usability guys get a lot of it right: you don't always give the user what they want, sometimes we should to give them what they need.